Thanks for posting this. I know a school teacher who has students who speak Mayan. Two different dialects in fact. Interesting to know what she might be hearing.
Having studied 4 of the “Romance” languages derived from Roman Latin, it is amazing how different each language sounds from the other despite the fact they have many similar words and grammar structures. I am speaking of Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese.
While studying in Mexico in the late 1950s, I took a linguistics course during which we studied Nahuatl (the Aztec language) which at that time was spoken by around 1/2 million people, many monolingual. I traveled south to Oaxaca and then San Cristobal de las Casas, where I joined some other Americans on a horseback visit to a Mayan related village 6 miles away from the nearest vehicle road. It was a large village of from 500 to 1,000 people. The first thing we did when we arrived was look for the Mayor and his 2 assistants. THey were the only people in the village who spoke Spanish, and we asked their permission to waalk around the village and take pictures. Everyone except these 3 men mostly wore hand woven native garments. They were also hold a religious festival which mixed Indian and Spanish religious traditions. The town church had not had a priest since the 1930s.