Bilingualism in the Maya Codices and the Books of Chilam Balam

Bricker, Victoria R.

doi:10.1075/wll.3.1.05bri

Article published In: Language and Dialect in the Maya Hieroglyphic Script
Gabrielle Vail and Martha J. Macri
[Written Language & Literacy 3:1] 2000
► pp. 77–115

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Bilingualism in the Maya Codices and the Books of Chilam Balam

Victoria R. Bricker | Tulane University

Published online: 30 June 2000

https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.3.1.05bri

The bilingualism recently discovered in the Maya codices by Robert Wald and Alfonso Lacadena has parallels in the Colonial Maya Books of Chilam Balam, which show both linguistic and scriptural bilingualism — involving, on the one hand, the Maya and Spanish languages, and on the other, the logosyllabic and alphabetic scripts of these two cultures. The article explores the continuities and discontinuities in these language contact phenomena with respect to vocabulary, morphology, syntax, spelling conventions, style, and text format.

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Cited by six other publications

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