Cauqué Mayan (also known as KaqchikelâÂÂKüicheü Mixed language) is a mixed language spoken in the aldea of Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué, Santiago Sacatepéquez, in the Department of Sacatepéquez in Guatemala. It is a Küicheü (Quiché) base relexified by Kaqchikel (Cakchiquel). During the colonial era, Küicheü migrated to Sacatepéquez, in the heart of Kaqchikel territory, where they founded the village of Santa MarÃÂa Cauque. Today only older adults retain the Küicheü base to their speech: for younger speakers, the language has merged into Kaqchikel.
While the language's grammatical base is from Küicheü, its lexicon is supplied by Kaqchikel. It is generally thought that in the 15th century during the colonial period, its original Küicheü speakers came from the area of what is now the Department of Quiché and founded Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué. Currently, the aldea is west of Guatemala City and at least 100 miles from the nearest Küicheü-speaking region. The exact origin of this mixed language's Küicheüan grammatical base is not agreed upon, with some sources listing the Küicheü dialect of Joyabaj as having been the contributing grammar, while others state that the area of current-day city of Quetzaltenango is from where the original Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué founders and their respective Küicheü dialect came. In any case, it is clear that a variety of the original Küicheü language was brought into and has continued to manifest in the grammar of this KaqchikelâÂÂKüicheü Mixed Language, while it demonstrates the result of relexification over time from the surrounding Kaqchikel language. This particular process of relexification of the original Küicheü that had emigrated to a predominantly Kaqchikel-speaking region probably began with borrowing from the contact language (Kaqchikel) of roots and content morphemes, such as nouns and verbs. This heavy lexical influence is understood to have been a significant deviation in "content" words from those that were part of the original Joyabaj dialect of Küicheü to their current Kaqchikel counterparts in the KaqchikelâÂÂKüicheü Mixed Language, while at the same time there has been no structural borrowing from the surrounding Kaqchikel to replace the grammar that appears to have originated from Küicheü.
According to a preliminary phonological analysis by Paul S. Stevenson, the speech of those from Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué came from an original variety of Küicheü, which now acts as the mixed language's grammatical base. This evidence is realized in Küicheü morphological-syntactic elements surrounding Kaqchikel vocabulary. This includes verb inflection for present tense-aspect marker, from which the Küicheü prefix //k-// is implemented, contrasted with the more typical Kaqchikel prefixes of //y-// and //n-//. Furthermore, Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué utilizes Küicheü suffixes at the end of a phrase that indicate whether the verb was transitive or intransitive, //-o//~//-u// or //-ik// respectively, those which Kaqchikel does not. In fact, the //-ik// suffix can also be found with positionals in Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué. Possession by a third person singular, preconsonantal, displays Küicheü //u-// and not Kaqchikel //ru-//. The third person pronoun is also affected, in that the mixed language shows a higher number of speakers displaying Küicheü rareü 'him/her/it', instead of Kaqchikel rijaü 'him/her/it'. Function words are still marked by Küicheü as well, with //-ukü// 'with' and not Kaqchikel //-iküin//. While the majority of grammatical elements in Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué are presented in Küicheü, the majority of lexical elements are realized in Kaqchikel.
Following Bakker and Muysken's criteria of mixed languages, the Cauqué Mixed Language, with its convergence of Küicheü grammar and Kaqchikel lexicon, is a result of geographical and historical social influence of identity (López 1999). As documented in 1998 and 2003, there are about 2,000 speakers of the KaqchikelâÂÂKüicheü Mixed Language in the Santa MarÃÂa Cauqué aldea. They are mainly adults older than 30 years of age, while there does not seem to be as much language transmission to the younger generations. These speakers also display bilingualism in the surrounding South Central Kaqchikel dialect, while the numbers of those also bilingual in Spanish continues to grow. While there are previous assertions that the mixed language has not undergone structural borrowing, there still appears to be a shift within the language to become more like South Central Kaqchikel, since older speakers show more of a Küicheü morphological-syntactic base.