Prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, “Guatemala was originally the land of the Mayas.” Guatemala “still has a very active population” of Mayas as it is considered to be the birthplace of the Mayan civilization. There is an estimate of six million Mayas left today with the majority living in Guatemala. Language is an extremely important part of the Maya culture. It is a widely held belief in Guatemala that, “Mayan languages are not really ‘languages,’ but ‘dialects,’ lacking a grammar, a literature and the wherewithal to express modern ideas and complex thoughts.” Yet, K’ichee’, one of the Maya’s twenty-three languages, has “close to one million speakers over an area covering nearly half of the Guatemalan
