Tzeltal or Tseltal (/ˈ(t)sɛltɑːl/)[2] is a Mayan language spoken in the Mexican state of Chiapas, mostly in the municipalities of Ocosingo, Altamirano, Huixtán, Tenejapa, Yajalón, Chanal, Sitalá, Amatenango del Valle, Socoltenango, Las Rosas, Chilón, San Juan Cancuc, San Cristóbal de las Casas and Oxchuc.

Tzeltal is one of many Mayan languages spoken near this eastern region of Chiapas, including Tzotzil, Chʼol, and Tojolabʼal, among others.

There is also a small Tzeltal diaspora in other parts of Mexico and the United States, primarily as a result of unfavorable economic conditions in Chiapas.

[3] Partially as a result of these migrations, during which the Tzeltal people and other cultural groups found each other in close proximity, four different dialects of Tzeltal have been described: north, central (including Oxchuc), south, and southeast, though the southeastern dialect is today spoken only by a few elderly and geographically dispersed speakers.

Nevertheless, its usage is almost exclusively oral; schools rarely incorporate Tzeltal materials, and as a result almost everyone under the age of 30 is bilingual in Spanish.

Tzeltal language programming is carried out by the CDI's radio station XEVFS, broadcasting from Las Margaritas, Chiapas.

with the assistance of translators – except during homilies – Bishop Arizmendi said in an article in the newspaper La Jornada.

When ⟨ʼb⟩ is found in the final position, it can be pronounced as ⟨ʼm⟩, or even disappear completely; thus cheb 'two' could sound like cheʼb, cheʼm, or even cheʼ.

Tzeltal is further classified as a head-marking language, meaning that grammatical marking typically occurs on the heads of phrases, rather than on its modifiers or dependents.

In addition to denoting grammatical possession, the suffix -Vl in Tzeltal is highly productive as a means of noun-to-noun, noun-to-adjective, and adjective-to-noun derivation, each exemplified below: In the case of noun-to-noun derivation, the suffix -il is particularly prominent, often used to produce a noun marked for non-referentiality in cases of interrogation.

In addition to suffixation and prefixation, Tzeltal uses the morphological processes of infixation, reduplication, and compounding to derive words.

A seventh class, particles, exists but is never inflected; they are radical or derived stems that function as words in syntactic constructions.

To create a transitive, active infinitive, the -el suffix is used along with a third-person ergative prefix which must agree with the subject of the verb.

Alternatively, a transitive infinitive can be expressed with the suffix -bel to the verbal theme; notably, these forms are fully inflected for ergative and absolutive cases.

As a secondary predicate, an effect verb is typically exhortative, or indicative/descriptive as in the sentence X-kox-lajan y-akan ya x-been ("his injured leg he walks," "he limped").

Thought often pre-aspirated, the prevocalic second person ergative form is the sole case of a Tzeltal initial vowel not preceded by a glottal stop.

In reality the auxiliary ya is a reduced form of the imperfective marker yak, though variation and conditioning vary greatly across dialects.

[20] In the Bachajón dialect it has been morphologically reanalyzed as a prefix (rather than an auxiliary or preverb), but only when the verb is marked for the second-person ergative.

Compare the following two sentences, each with the intransitive verb bajtʼ ("go"), the first perfective and the second imperfective: Transitive verbs in the perfective aspect are marked with the auxiliary preverb la ~ laj, the full form laj used in the Oxchuc dialect only when the auxiliary appears alone, as an affirmation.

For example, to announce one's immediate departure ("I'm going (now)"), the verb meaning "go" would be marked for the perfective aspect, even though the social circumstances of such a locution would necessitate that the action not yet be complete.

Perfect constructions in Tzeltal can also signal a "persistent state," similar to the function described above but without the necessity that the characterization be the result of an action or event.

If the transitive verb tiʼ ("eat [something]") were marked for the perfect aspect in such a construction, (Aybal a-tiʼ-oj-ix max?)

In the second, which only occurs with inflected transitive infinitives, the auxiliary yak(al) is unmarked while the second verb, still in the infinitive, takes person markers: The following schematic represents the full range of possible elements that may exist in a noun phrase:[21] [Determiner/demonstrative] [numeral (+classifier)] [adjective(s)] [NOUN] [noun-phrase possessor] [relative clause] The initial position of the noun phrase may be occupied by either the determiner te (often followed by the final-position clitic, =e), or a demonstrative.

There are two demonstratives, the proximal ini ~ in ~ i and the distal me, and both are accompanied by the final-position clitic =to, which serves a deictic function in reinforcing the act of signaling.

When the adjective serves an epithetical function, it takes the suffix -Vl, or -Vm with adjectives of color applied to animals, as in the sentence Le way-al aa te j-kojtʼ mukʼ-ul tiʼwal sak-im tsʼiʼ ("A ferocious big white dog is sleeping there": mukʼ "big," sak "white").

In sentence 2, neither the object nor the subject argument appears as a noun phrase; Tzeltal almost never uses pronouns as unmarked topics.

The presence of two affixes completes the meaning of the transitive predicate, without the need, as in English, for separate deictic arguments.

However, in the case of passive phrases, the semantic agent may appear unmarked, while the absolutive suffix is preceded by the passive suffix, -ot: Tiʼ-ot(-Ø) tsʼiʼ te Mikel ("Mikel was bitten by a dog"; the verb takes only the absolutive person marker -Ø, while, the agent tsʼiʼ ("dog") doesn't correspond to an ergative person marker on the verb.)

If jaʼ is marking a change in topic within a discourse, it is immediately followed by the adverb xan ("more"), often reduced in casual speech to jaʼan, jan or even an.

To mark a contrastive topic, as in the English sentence "Michael I saw, but John (on the other hand) I did not," yan ("other") appears before the contrastive topic ("John" in the example), along with the pronoun -tukel: Te Petule, la jk-il; yan te Mikele, ma chiknaj s-tukel.