Ица

Itzá Maya (autonymously Itzaj T'an, also spelled Itza or Itzá) is a Yucatecan Mayan language of Petén, Guatemala — the last surviving language of the historic Itzá Maya, the people who founded the kingdom of Tayasal at Lake Petén Itzá. The Tayasal kingdom was famously the last independent Maya state, conquered by the Spanish only in 1697 — more than 200 years after the rest of the Maya world had fallen. The Itzá kingdom maintained pre-Columbian political continuity from the Postclassic Maya era through the colonial period via geographic isolation in the Petén jungle. Today, only around 1,000 elderly speakers remain, primarily in San José village on the northern shore of Lake Petén Itzá; younger Itzá Maya generations have shifted to Spanish. Linguistically, Itzá is closely related to Yucatec Maya (yua) but with distinct vocabulary preserving Postclassic Yucatecan features lost in the modern Yucatec dialect.