Yucatec Maya (Yukatek Maya in the revised orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala), called Màaya t'àan (lit. "Maya speech") by its speakers, is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. To native speakers, it is known only as Maya - "Yucatec" is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as K'iche' and Itza' Maya).

In the Mexican states of Yucatán, some parts of Campeche, Tabasco, Chiapas, and Quintana Roo, Maya remains many speakers' first language today, with approximately 800,000 to 1.2 million speakers.

A characteristic feature of Yucatec Mayan (and all Mayan languages) is the use of ejective consonants - /pʼ/, /tʼ/, /kʼ/. Often referred to as glottalized consonants, they are produced at the same place of oral articulation as their non-ejective stop counterparts - /p/, /t/, /k/. However, the release of the lingual closure is preceded by a raising of the closed glottis to increase the air pressure in the space between the glottis and the point of closure, resulting in a release with a characteristic popping sound. These sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants (e.g., t'àan "speech" vs. táan "forehead"). The apostrophes indicating these sounds were not common in written Maya until the 20th century but are now becoming more common. The Mayan b is also glottalized, an implosive /ɓ/, and is sometimes written b', though this is becoming less common.

Eduard Marian Ilie (born 29 June 1986 in Bucharest), better known as Edward Maya, is a Romanian musician, producer, performer, and composer. He graduated from George Enescu Music High School in Bucharest and is currently a final year student at the Bucharest Conservatory.

In and around 2006, Maya worked with many Romanian artists such as Akcent, Vika Jigulina, Blaxy Girls, DJ Sava, DJ Rynno and Liviu Hodor. He worked also on the song Tornerò, which was performed by Mihai Trăistariu in the Eurovision Song Contest 2006. He added in an interview on Beat-Town.com that this song "was the beginning of my career"

In the summer of 2009, Maya launched his first song as an artist, "Stereo Love", reaching number 2 in the Romanian singles charts. Later that year, "Stereo Love" became a hit in clubs all over the world. While this success was followed by concerts worldwide, the song entered the top-5 singles charts in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK. "Stereo Love" has received over 173 million YouTube views since August 2009, for just one video.

Mopan are one of the Maya peoples in Belize and Guatemala. Their indigenous language is also called Mopan and is one of the Yucatec Maya languages.

The British forced the Mopan out of British Honduras into Guatemala. The Mopan in Guatemala meanwhile endured slavery. In the 19th century, many Guatemalan Mopan fled back into British Honduras.

In the 2000 Census, 6,909 Belizeans recorded Mopan as their mother tongue and 6,093 as their first language; 3% the population.

Jane Coles is a British playwright. She won the 1994 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Maya Angelou ( /ˈmaɪ.ə ˈændʒəloʊ/; born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, numerous books of poetry, and is credited with a long list of plays, movies, and television shows. She is one of the most decorated writers of her generation, with dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly acclaimed, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her first seventeen years, and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

Angelou's long list of occupations has included pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.