Maya, indigenous people of Mexico and Central America, South American Indigenous Peoples

Related Category: South American Indigenous Peoples

Maya[mI´u, Span. mA´yA] Pronunciation Key, indigenous people of S Mexico and Central America, occupying an area comprising the YucatAn peninsula and much of the present state of Chiapas, Mexico; Guatemala and Belize; parts of El Salvador and extreme western Honduras. Speaking a group of closely related languages (with an outlier, Huastec, spoken in the PAnuco basin of Mexico), the population of Maya today is over 4 million.