| Summary: | The presence and distribution of speakers of the Yucatekan Maya language in the Yucatan Peninsula from the early classic until the time of contact with the Spaniards are studied through an analysis of hieroglyphic inscriptions under the approaches of the theory of integrational semiotics. Since written language is a cultural product that serves as an alternative means of communication to the spoken language, a hypothesis that a language spoken in a certain geographical area tends to leave its particular features in the inscription code must consider, apart from linguistic aspects of the language under study, biomechanical, macrosocial and circumstantial factors that interfere in its graphic-visual manifestation. Complementing the advances of historical linguistics and epigraphy or grammatology in the field of Maya hieroglyphs with the linguistic, geographical, historical, cultural and social information documented in colonial sources, an integral proposal is elaborated for the process of the expansion of the speakers of the Yucatekan Maya language in pre-Hispanic times.
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