Unlike some of the large empires that dominate popular imagination of the ancient Americas, the Pre-Columbian Maya were never unified under a single ruler or a single state. Instead, the region that is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador held dozens of independent city-states, sometimes allied, often at war with one another, sharing a broadly common civilization, writing system and calendar while remaining politically fragmented for most of their documented history. That pattern of shared culture without shared politics carried forward into the present: the roughly thirty languages of the modern Mayan family, from Yucatec Maya in the peninsula to K'iche' and Kaqchikel in the Guatemalan highlands, are related but often not mutually intelligible, closer in relationship to each other than English is to German, but still distinct enough that speakers of different Mayan languages generally cannot understand one another without translation.
Spanish colonization from the sixteenth century onward imposed a shared colonial and later national framework over this linguistic diversity without erasing it, and Mayan peoples today remain the largest Indigenous population in Mesoamerica by most estimates, numbering in the millions across Mexico and Guatemala in particular. Guatemala's civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, fell with particular severity on highland Maya communities, and the conflict's scorched earth campaigns against them in the early 1980s have since been formally characterized by a United Nations-backed truth commission as acts of genocide, a history that shapes how many Mayan communities relate to the Guatemalan state to this day.