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Linguistic variation in space reflects patterns of social interaction. Gravity models have been successfully used to capture the role of urban centers in the dissemination of innovations in the speech community along with the diffusion of variants in space. Crucially, the effects of the factors of a gravity model (distance and population size) depend on language situation and may result from different sources, in particular processes of vertical and horizontal convergence. In the present study, we investigate lexical variation in contemporary Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, spoken in a situation of generalized bilingualism. This language situation lacks some crucial ingredients of vertical convergence: no variety of Yucatec Maya has the status of a standard variety: the language of administration and education is Spanish (diglossia-with-bilingualism). The present study finds evidence of convergence processes that can be exclusively attributed to horizontal convergence. The lexical distance between speakers decreases in and between urban centers, variants with a large distribution are more likely in areas with a maximum of interactions with other areas. Even Spanish variants are distributed in the sample with a pattern that reveals processes of horizontal convergence: their distribution is accounted for through an areal bias (widespread in areas with a stronger exposition to Spanish) rather by influences from the urban centers (as centers of administration/education) to the rural areas in their surroundings.

This book includes six studies on the acquisition of single Mesoamerican indigenous languages, (Huichol, Zapotec, and the Mayan languages Ch'ol, Tzeltal, K'iche', and Yukatek); and a crosslinguistic study of five Mayan languages (K'anjob'al, K'iche', Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek). Three topics are theoretically and methodologically discussed and empirically demonstrated: with respect to ergativity, the ergative-absolutive cross-referencing pattern on the morphological level, noun-verb distinction and the acquisition of body-part locatives in the early lexicon, and the role of semantic properties and cultural context in language acquisition and socialization. This book makes important claims regarding the methodology of cross-linguistic studies as well as the results of these studies and the comparative method used in the book (structural and discursive factors in language acquisition, cross-linguistic relationships and variation).