Nahuatl
Encyclopedia
Nahuatl (ˈnaːwatɬ,The Classical Nahuatl word (noun stem nāhua, + absolutive -tl ) is thought to mean "a good, clear sound" (Andrews 2003:578 2003:364,398) This language name has several spellings, among them náhuatl (the standard spelling in the Spanish language), Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl. In a back formation from the name of the language, the ethnic group of Nahuatl speakers are called Nahua. with stress on the first syllable) is a group of related languages and dialects of the Nahuan (traditionally called "Aztecan") branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family
. Collectively they are spoken by an estimated Nahua people, most of whom live in Central Mexico
. All Nahuan languages
are indigenous to Mesoamerica
.
Nahuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD. It was the language of the Aztec
s, who dominated what is now central Mexico during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology
. During the preceding century and a half, the expansion and influence of the Aztec Empire had led to the variety spoken by the residents of Tenochtitlan becoming a prestige language
in Mesoamerica. With the introduction of the Latin alphabet
, Nahuatl also became a literary language
and many chronicle
s, grammar
s, works of poetry
, administrative document
s and codices
were written in the 16th and 17th centuries. This early literary language based on the Tenochtitlan variety has been labeled Classical Nahuatl
and is among the most studied and best documented languages of the Americas
.
Today Nahuatl varieties
See Mesoamerican languages#Language vs. Dialect for a discussion on the difference between "languages" and "dialects" in Mesoamerica. are spoken in scattered communities mostly in rural areas. There are considerable differences among varieties, and some are mutually unintelligible
. They have all been subject to varying degrees of influence
from Spanish. No modern Nahuatl languages are identical to Classical Nahuatl, but those spoken in and around the Valley of Mexico
are generally more closely related to it than those on the periphery. Under Mexico's Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ("General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples") promulgated in 2003, Nahuatl along with the other indigenous languages of Mexico are recognized as lenguas nacionales ("national languages") in the regions where they are spoken, enjoying the same status as Spanish within their region.By the provisions of Article IV: Las lenguas indígenas...y el español son lenguas nacionales...y tienen la misma validez en su territorio, localización y contexto en que se hablen. ("The indigenous languages...and Spanish are national languages...and have the same validity in their territory, location and context in which they are spoken.")
Nahuatl is a language with a complex morphology
characterized by polysynthesis
and agglutination
(agglutinative language
), allowing the construction of long words with complex meanings out of several stems and affix
es. Nahuatl has been influenced by other Mesoamerican languages
through centuries of coexistence, and with them forms the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area
.
Many words from Nahuatl have been borrowed into Spanish and thence have diffused into hundreds of other languages. Most of these loanwords denote things indigenous to central Mexico which the Spanish heard mentioned for the first time by their Nahuatl names. English words of Nahuatl origin include "avocado
", "chayote
", "chili
", "chocolate
", "coyote
", "axolotl
" and "tomato
".
and Ronald Langacker
(1978), the Nahuan (Aztecan) branch of Uto-Aztecan is widely accepted as having two divisions, "General Aztec" and Pochutec.
General Aztec encompasses the Nahuatl and Pipil
languages."General Aztec is a generally accepted term referring to the most shallow common stage, reconstructed for all present-day Nahuatl varieties; it does not include the Pochutec dialect (Campbell & Langacker 1978)." Canger 2000:385 (Note 4) Pochutec is a scantily attested language which went extinct in the 20th century. The notion that Pochutec should not be considered a variety of Nahuatl was already several decades old, but Campbell and Langacker adduced new arguments for it. Other researchers maintain that Pochutec should be considered a divergent variant of the western periphery.
"Nahuatl" denotes at least Classical Nahuatl together with related modern languages spoken in Mexico. The inclusion of Pipil (Nawat) into the group is slightly controversial. Lyle Campbell, who has worked intensively with the Pipil language, classifies Pipil as separate from the Nahuatl branch within general Aztecan, whereas dialectologists like Una Canger
, Karen Dakin and Yolanda Lastra
prefer to include Pipil in the General Aztecan branch, citing close historical ties with the so-called eastern peripheral dialects of General Aztec.
. Evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory also supports the southward diffusion thesis, specifically that speakers of early Nahuan languages migrated from the northern Mexican deserts
into central Mexico in several waves. But recently, the traditional assessment has been challenged by Jane H. Hill
, who proposes instead that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in central Mexico and spread northwards at a very early date. This hypothesis and the analyses of data that it rests upon has received serious criticism.
The purported migration of speakers of the Proto-Nahuan language into the Mesoamerican region has been placed at sometime around AD 500, towards the end of the Early Classic period in Mesoamerican chronology
. Before reaching the central altiplano, pre-Nahuan groups probably spent a period of time in contact with the Coracholan languages
Cora
and Huichol
of northwestern Mexico (which are also Uto-Aztecan).
The major political and cultural center of Mesoamerica in the Early Classic period was Teotihuacan
. The identity of the language(s) spoken by Teotihuacan's founders has long been debated, with the relationship of Nahuatl to Teotihuacan being prominent in that enquiry. While in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was presumed that Teotihuacan had been founded by speakers of Nahuatl, later linguistic and archaeological research tended to disconfirm this view. Instead, the timing of the Nahuatl influx was seen to coincide more closely with Teotihuacan's fall than its rise, and other candidates such as Totonacan
identified as more likely. But recently, evidence from Mayan epigraphy
of possible Nahuatl loanwords in Mayan languages has been interpreted as demonstrating that other Mesoamerican languages may have been borrowing words from Proto-Nahuan (or its early descendants) significantly earlier than previously thought, bolstering the possibility of a significant Nahuatl presence at Teotihuacan.
In Mesoamerica the Mayan
, Oto-Manguean
and Mixe–Zoquean language families had coexisted for millennia. This had given rise to the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area
(a linguistic area being one where a set of language traits have become common among the area's language by diffusion and not by evolution within a set of languages belonging to a common genetic subgrouping). After the Nahuas migrated into the Mesoamerican cultural zone, their language too adopted some of the traits defining the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. Examples of such adopted traits are the use of relational noun
s, the appearance of calque
s, or loan translations, and a form of possessive construction typical of Mesoamerican languages.
A language which was the ancestor of Pochutec
split from Proto-Nahuan (or Proto-Aztecan) possibly as early as AD 400, arriving in Mesoamerica a few centuries earlier than the main bulk of speakers of Nahuan languages. Some Nahuan groups migrated south along the Central America
n isthmus, reaching perhaps as far as Nicaragua. The moribund Pipil language
of El Salvador is the only living descendant of the variety of Nahuatl once spoken south of present day Mexico.
Beginning in the 7th century Nahuan speakers rose to power in central Mexico. The people of the Toltec
culture of Tula, Hidalgo
, which was active in central Mexico around the 10th century, are thought to have been Nahuatl speakers. By the 11th century, Nahuatl speakers were dominant in the Valley of Mexico
and far beyond, with settlements including Azcapotzalco
, Colhuacan
and Cholula
rising to prominence. Nahua migrations into the region from the north continued into the Postclassic
period. One of the last of these migrations to arrive in the Valley of Mexico settled on an island in the Lake Texcoco
and proceeded to subjugate the surrounding tribes. This group was the Mexica
(or Mexihka), who over the course of the next three centuries founded an empire named Tenochtitlan. Their political and linguistic influence came to extend into Central America and Nahuatl became a lingua franca
among merchants and elites in Mesoamerica, e.g., among the Quiché (K'iche') Maya.
in 1519, the tables were turned on the Nahuatl language: it was displaced as the dominant regional language. Nevertheless, due to the Spanish making alliances with first the Nahuatl speakers from Tlaxcala
and later with the conquered Aztecs, the Nahuatl language continued spreading throughout Mesoamerica in the decades after the conquest, when Spanish expeditions with thousands of Nahua soldiers marched north and south to conquer new territories. Jesuit missions in northern Mexico and the southwestern US
region often included a barrio
of Tlaxcaltec soldiers who remained to guard the mission. For example, some fourteen years after the northeastern city of Saltillo, Coahuila, was founded in 1577, a Tlaxcaltec community was resettled in a separate nearby village, San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala
to cultivate the land and aid colonization efforts that had stalled in the face of local hostility to the Spanish settlement. As for the conquest of modern day Central America, Pedro de Alvarado
conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec allies, who then settled outside of modern day Antigua
. Similar episodes occurred across El Salvador
and Honduras
, with Nahuatl speakers settling in communities that were often named after them. In Honduras for example, two of these barrios are called "Mexicapa"; another in El Salvador is called "Mejicanos". Nahua soldiers formed the bulk of the Spanish forces which conquered the Philippines and even today Chavacano
, a Spanish based creole spoken in the Philippines, has many Nahuatl words.
As a part of their missionary efforts, members of various religious orders (principally Fransciscan friar
s, Dominican
friars, and Jesuits) introduced the Latin alphabet
to the Nahuas. Within the first twenty years after the Spanish arrival, texts were being prepared in the Nahuatl language written in Latin characters. Simultaneously, schools were founded, such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco
in 1536, which taught both indigenous and classical European languages to both Indians and priest
s. Missionary grammarians undertook the writing of grammar
sColonial Spanish grammars of indigenous languages were often called "artes", arte being the word for "art" in the sense of "manner". of indigenous languages for use by priests. The first Nahuatl grammar, written by Andrés de Olmos
, was published in 1547—three years before the first French
grammar. By 1645 four more had been published, authored respectively by Alonso de Molina
(1571), Antonio del Rincón
(1595), Diego de Galdo Guzmán (1642), and Horacio Carochi
(1645). Carochi's is today considered the most important of the colonial era grammars of Nahuatl.
In 1570 King Philip II of Spain
decreed that Nahuatl should become the official language of the colonies of New Spain
in order to facilitate communication between the Spanish and natives of the colonies. This led to the Spanish missionaries teaching Nahuatl to Indians living as far south as Honduras
and El Salvador
. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Classical Nahuatl was used as a literary language, and a large corpus of texts from that period is in existence today. Texts from this period include histories, chronicles, poetry, theatrical works, Christian canonical works, ethnographic descriptions, and administrative documents. The Spanish permitted a great deal of autonomy in the local administration of indigenous towns during this period, and in many Nahuatl speaking towns Nahuatl was the de facto administrative language both in writing and speech. A large body of Nahuatl literature was composed during this period, including the Florentine Codex
, a twelve-volume compendium of Aztec culture compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún
; Crónica Mexicayotl
, a chronicle of the royal lineage of Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc
; Cantares Mexicanos
, a collection of songs in Nahuatl; a Nahuatl-Spanish/Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary compiled by Alonso de Molina
; and the Huei tlamahuiçoltica
, a description in Nahuatl of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe
.
Grammars and dictionaries of indigenous languages were composed throughout the colonial period, but their quality was highest in the initial period. The friars found that learning all the indigenous languages was impossible in practice, so they concentrated on Nahuatl. For a time, the linguistic situation in Mesoamerica remained relatively stable, but in 1696 King Charles II
issued a decree
banning the use of any language other than Spanish throughout the Spanish Empire
. In 1770 another decree, calling for the elimination of the indigenous languages, did away with Classical Nahuatl as a literary language.
Throughout the modern period the situation of indigenous languages has grown increasingly precarious in Mexico, and the numbers of speakers of virtually all indigenous languages have dwindled. Although the absolute number of Nahuatl speakers has actually risen over the past century, indigenous populations have become increasingly marginalized in Mexican society. In 1895, Nahuatl was spoken by over 5% of the population. By 2000, this proportion had fallen to 1.49%. Given the process of marginalization combined with the trend of migration to urban areas and to the United States
, some linguists are warning of impending language death
. At present Nahuatl is mostly spoken in rural areas by an impoverished class of indigenous subsistence agriculturists. According to the Mexican national statistics institute, INEGI, 51% of Nahuatl speakers are involved in the farming sector and 6 in 10 receive no wages or less than the minimum wage.
From the early 20th century to at least the mid-1980s, educational policies in Mexico focused on the hispanization (castellanización) of indigenous communities, teaching only Spanish and discouraging the use of indigenous languages. As a result, today there is no group of Nahuatl speakers having attained general literacy in Nahuatl; while their literacy rate in Spanish also remains much lower than the national average. Even so, Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people, of whom around 10% are monolingual. The survival of Nahuatl dialects as a whole is not imminently endangered, but the survival of certain dialects is, and some dialects have already become extinct within the last few decades of the 20th century.
The 1990s saw the onset of diametric changes in official Mexican government policies towards indigenous and linguistic rights. Developments of accords in the international rights arenaSuch as the 1996 adoption at a world linguistics conference in Barcelona of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
, a declaration which "became a general reference point for the evolution and discussion of linguistic rights in Mexico" (Pellicer et al. 2006:132). combined with domestic pressuresSuch as social and political agitation by the EZLN and indigenous social movements. led to legislative reforms and the creation of decentralized government agencies like CDI and INALI
with responsibilities for the promotion and protection of indigenous communities and languages. In particular, the federal Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ["General Law on the Language Rights of the Indigenous Peoples", promulgated 13 March 2003] recognizes all the country's indigenous languages, including Nahuatl, as "national languages" and gives indigenous people the right to use them in all spheres of public and private life. In Article 11, it grants access to compulsory, bilingual and intercultural education
.
In February 2008 the mayor of Mexico City
, Marcelo Ebrard
, launched a drive to have all government employees learn Nahuatl. Ebrard stated he would continue institutionalizing Nahuatl and that it was important for Mexico to remember its history and its tradition.
A spectrum of Nahuatl dialects
is currently spoken in an area stretching from the northern state of Durango
to Veracruz
in the southeast. Pipil
(also known as Nawat), the southernmost Nahuan language, is spoken in El Salvador
by a small number of speakers. According to IRIN-International, the Nawat Language Recovery Initiative project, there are no reliable figures for the contemporary numbers of speakers of Pipil / Nawat. Numbers may range anywhere from "perhaps a few hundred people, perhaps only a few dozen."
Based on figures accumulated by INEGI from the national census conducted in 2000, Nahuatl is spoken by an estimated 1.45 million people, some 198,000 (14.9%) of whom are monolingual.In this analysis, monolinguals are counted as those who do not speak Spanish. It may be possible that some also speak other Nahuatl variants, or other indigenous languages. There is gender disparity in monolingualism, with females representing nearly two thirds of all monolinguals. The states of Guerrero and Hidalgo have the highest rates of monolingual Nahuatl speakers as a proportion of the total Nahuatl speaking population, calculated at 24.2% and 22.6%, respectively. The proportion of monolinguals for most other states is less than 5%. Put another way, more than 95% of the Nahuatl speaking population in most states speaks at least one other language, usually Spanish; nationally, the figure is about 86% of the total.
The largest concentrations of Nahuatl speakers are found in the states of Puebla
, Veracruz
, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí
, and Guerrero
. Significant populations are also found in Mexico State, Morelos
, and the Federal District, with smaller communities in Michoacán
and Durango
. Nahuatl became extinct during the 20th century in the states of Jalisco
and Colima
. As a result of internal migrations within the country, Nahuatl speaking communities exist in all of Mexico's states. The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States
has resulted in the establishment of a few small Nahuatl speaking communities in that country, particularly in California
, New York
, Texas
, New Mexico
and Arizona
.
.
The speakers of Nahuatl themselves often refer to their language as either Mexicano or some word derived from mācēhualli, the Nahuatl word for "commoner". One example of the latter is the case for Nahuatl spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos
, whose speakers call their language mösiehuali. The Pipil of El Salvador do not call their own language "Pipil", as most linguists do, but rather nawat. The Nahuas of Durango
call their language Mexicanero. Speakers of Nahuatl of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
call their language mela'tajtol ("the straight language"). Some speech communities use "Nahuatl" as the name for their language although this seems to be a recent innovation. Linguists commonly identify localized dialects of Nahuatl by adding as a qualifier the name of the village or area where that variety is spoken.
(1980, 1988) and Lastra de Suárez
(1986). Canger introduced the scheme of a Central grouping several Peripheral groupings, and Lastra confirmed this notion, differing in some details. Each of the groupings is defined by shared characteristic grammatical features which in turn suggest a shared history. Canger includes dialects of La Huasteca
in the Center Peripheral group, while Lastra de Suárez places them in their own subgroup of Peripheral. Below, Lastra de Suarez's classification is combined with Campbell
1997's classification of Uto-Aztecan. (Campbell's positing of higher level subgroupings of Uto-Aztecan, specifically "Shoshonean" and "Sonoran", above the eight uncontroversial branches is not yet generally accepted. Also, Lastra's including Pipil under Nahuatl is not accepted by Campbell, who has been the leading investigator of Pipil.)
(PUA). The table below shows the phonemic
inventory of Classical Nahuatl as an example of a typical Nahuan language. In some dialects the /t͡ɬ/ phoneme that is so common in classical Nahuatl has changed into either /t/ as it has happened in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl
, Mexicanero
and Pipil
or into /l/ as it has happened in Nahuatl of Pómaro, Michoacán
. Many dialects no longer distinguish between short and long vowel
s. Some have introduced completely new vowel qualities to compensate for this, as is the case for Tetelcingo Nahuatl
. Others have developed a pitch accent
, such as Nahuatl of Oapan, Guerrero
. Many modern dialects have also borrowed phonemes from Spanish, such as /b, d, ɡ, f/.
Most Nahuatl dialects have stress on the penultimate syllable of a word. In Mexicanero Nahuat from Durango, many unstressed syllables have disappeared from words, and the placement of syllable stress has become phonemic in this dialect (compare "present" and "present" in English).
, in Nahuatl, is not very rich in most varieties. In many dialects the voiced consonants are often devoiced in wordfinal position and in consonant clusters: /j/ devoices to a voiceless palatal sibilant
/ʃ/, /w/ devoices to a voiceless glottal fricative
[h] or to a voiceless labialized velar approximant [ʍ], and /l/ devoices to voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
[ɬ]. In some dialects the first consonant in almost any consonant cluster becomes [h]. Some dialects have productive lenition
of voiceless
consonants into their voiced counterparts between vowels. The nasals
are normally assimilated
to the place of articulation of a following consonant. The voiceless alveolar lateral affricate
[t͡ɬ] is assimilated after /l/ and pronounced [l].
s have two alternating forms, one with a vowel i to prevent consonant clusters, and one without. For example, the absolutive suffix
has the variant forms – tli (used after consonants) and – tl (used after vowels). Some modern varieties however have formed complex clusters due to vowel loss. Others have contracted syllable sequences, causing accents to shift or vowels to become long.Sischo 1979:312 and Canger 2000 for a brief description of these phenomena in Nahual of Michoacán and Durango respectively
reduplication
. By reduplicating the first syllable of a root
a new word is formed. In nouns this is often used to form plurals, e.g. /tlaːkatl/ "man" > /tlaːtlaːkah/ "men", but also in some varieties to form diminutive
s, honorific
s, or for derivations
. In verbs reduplication is often used to form a reiterative (expressing repetition), or to intensify the meaning of the verb. E.g. /kitta/ "he sees it", /kihitta/ "he looks at it repeatedly" and /kiːitta/ "he stares at it".
, polysynthetic
languages that make extensive use of compounding, incorporation and derivation. That is, they can add many different prefixes and suffix
es to a root
until very long words are formed – and a single word can constitute an entire sentence.
The following verb
shows how the verb is marked for subject
, patient
, object
, and indirect object:
(singular and plural) and possession (i.e., whether the noun is possessed, as is indicated by a prefix meaning 'my', 'your', etc.). Plural forms of nouns are normally formed by adding a suffix
, although some words form irregular plurals by using reduplication
. Nahuatl has neither case
nor gender
, but Classical Nahuatl and some modern dialects distinguish between animate
and inanimate nouns, the distinction manifesting with respect to pluralization. In Classical Nahuatl only animate nouns could take a plural form, whereas all inanimate nouns were uncountable (as the words "bread" and "money" are uncountable in English). Nowadays many dialects do not maintain this distinction and all nouns may take a plural inflection, although it is often the case that most inanimates, and even some animates, do not, i.e. their absolutive form can be understood as either singular or plural.
In most varieties of Nahuatl, most nouns in the unpossessed singular form take a suffix traditionally called an "absolutive". The most common forms of the absolutive are -tl after vowels, -tli after consonants other than l, and -li after l.
Noun compounds are commonly formed by combining two or more nominal stems, or combining a nominal stem with other an adjectival stem or a verbal stem.
Singular noun:
Plural animate noun:
Nahuatl distinguishes between possessed and unpossessed forms of nouns. The absolutive suffix is not used on possessed nouns. In all dialects, possessed nouns take a prefix agreeing with number and person of its possessor.
Absolutive noun:
Possessed noun:
Nahuatl does not have grammatical case
but uses what is sometimes called a relational noun
to describe spatial (and other) relations. These morpheme
s cannot appear alone but must always occur after a noun or a possessive prefix. They are also often called postpositions or locative suffixes. In some ways these locative constructions resemble, and can be thought of as, locative case constructions. Most modern dialects have incorporated prepositions from Spanish that are competing with or that have completely replaced relational nouns.
Uses of relational noun/postposition/locative -pan with a possessive prefix:
Use with a preceding noun stem:
variety, there has come to be a distinction between inclusive
(I/we and you) and exclusive
(we but not you) forms of the first person plural:
First person plural pronoun in Classical Nahuatl:
First person plural pronouns in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuat:
Much more common is an honorific/non-honorific distinction, usually applied to second and third persons but not first.
Non-honorific forms:
Honorific forms
es, and suffix
es. The prefixes indicate the person of the subject
, and person and number of the object
and indirect object, whereas the suffixes indicate tense, aspect, mood and subject number.
Most Nahuatl dialects distinguish three tenses: present, past, and future, and two aspects: perfective
and imperfective
. Some varieties add progressive
or habitual aspects. All dialects distinguish at least the indicative and imperative moods, while some also have optative and vetative moods.
Most Nahuatl varieties have a number of ways to alter the valency
of a verb. Classical Nahuatl had a passive voice, but this is not found in most modern varieties. However the applicative
and causative voices are found in many modern dialects. Many Nahuatl varieties also allow forming verbal compounds with two or more verbal roots.
The following verbal form has two verbal roots and is inflected for causative voice and both a direct and indirect object:
Some Nahuatl varieties, notably Classical Nahuatl, can inflect the verb to show the direction of the verbal action going away from or towards the speaker. Some also have specific inflectional categories showing purpose and direction and such complex notions as "to go in order to" or "to come in order to", "go, do and return", "do while going", "do while coming", "do upon arrival", or "go around doing".
Classical Nahuatl and many modern dialects have grammaticalised ways to express politeness towards addressees or even towards people or things that are being mentioned, by using special verb forms and special "honorific suffixes".
Familiar verbal form:
Honorific verbal form:
, meaning that word order in Nahuatl is basically free. Nahuatl allows all possible orderings of the three basic sentence constituents. It is prolifically a pro-drop language: it allows sentences with omission of all noun phrases or independent pronouns, not just of noun phrases or pronouns whose function is the sentence subject. In most varieties independent pronoun
s are used only for emphasis. It allows certain kinds of syntactically discontinuous expressions.
Michel Launey argues that Nahuatl has a verb-initial basic word order with extensive freedom for variation, which is then used to encode pragmatic
functions such as focus and topicality.
It has been argued that classical Nahuatl syntax is best characterised by "omnipredicativity", meaning that any noun or verb in the language is in fact a full predicative sentence. A radical interpretation of Nahuatl syntactic typology, this nonetheless seems to account for some of the language's peculiarities, for example, why nouns must also carry the same agreement prefixes as verbs, and why predicates do not require any noun phrases to function as their arguments. For example the verbal form tzahtzi means "he/she/it shouts", and with the second person prefix titzahtzi it means "you shout". Nouns are inflected in the same way: the noun "konētl" means not just "child", but also "it is a child", and tikonētl means "you are a child". This prompts the omnipredicative interpretation, which posits that all nouns are also predicates. A phrase such as tzahtzi in konētl should not be interpreted as meaning just "the child screams" but, more correctly, "it screams, (the one that) is a child".
, combined with the minority status of Nahuatl and the higher prestige associated with Spanish has caused many changes in modern Nahuatl varieties, with large numbers of words borrowed from Spanish into Nahuatl, and the introduction of new syntactic constructions and grammatical categories.
For example, a construction like the following, with several borrowed words and particles, is common in many modern varieties (Spanish loanwords in boldface):
In some modern dialects basic word order has become a fixed subject–verb–object, probably under influence from Spanish. Other changes in the syntax of modern Nahuatl include the use of Spanish prepositions instead of native postpositions or relational nouns and the reinterpretation of original postpositions/relational nouns into prepositions. In the following example, from Michoacán Nahual, the postposition -ka meaning "with" appears used as a preposition, with no preceding object:
And, in this example from Mexicanero
Nahuat, of Durango
, the original postposition/relational noun -pin "in/on" is used as a preposition. "porque", a preposition borrowed from Spanish, also occurs in the sentence.
Many dialects have also undergone a degree of simplification of their morphology which has caused some scholars to consider them to have ceased to be polysynthetic.
Many Nahuatl words have been borrowed
into the Spanish language
, most of which are terms designating things indigenous to the American continent. Some of these loans are restricted to Mexican or Central American Spanish, but others have entered all the varieties of Spanish in the world. A number of them, such as "chocolate", "tomato" and "avocado" have made their way into many other languages via Spanish.
Likewise a number of English words have been borrowed from Nahuatl through Spanish. Two of the most prominent are undoubtedly chocolate
While there is no real doubt that the word "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the commonly given Nahuatl etymology /ʃokolaːtl/ "bitter water" no longer seems to be tenable. Dakin and Wichmann (2000) suggest the correct etymology to be /tʃikolaːtl/ - a word found in several modern Nahuatl dialects. and tomato
(from Nahuatl tomatl). Other common words such as coyote
(from Nahuatl coyotl), avocado
(from Nahuatl ahuacatl) and chile or chili
(from Nahuatl chilli). The word chicle
is also derived from Nahuatl tzictli "sticky stuff, chicle". Some other English words from Nahuatl are: Aztec
, (from aztecatl); cacao (from Nahuatl cacahuatl 'shell, rind'); ocelot
(from ocelotl). In Mexico many words for common everyday concepts attest to the close contact between Spanish and Nahuatl, so many in fact that entire dictionaries of "mexicanismos" (words particular to Mexican Spanish) have been published tracing Nahuatl etymologies, as well as Spanish words with origins in other indigenous languages. Many well known toponyms also come from Nahuatl, including Mexico (from the Nahuatl word for the Aztec capital mexihco) and Guatemala (from the word cuauhtēmallan).The Mexica used the word for the Kaqchikel capital Iximche
in central Guatemala, but the word was extended to the entire zone in colonial times; see Carmack 1981:143.
Pre-Columbian Aztec writing was not a proper writing system, since it could not represent the full vocabulary of a spoken language in the way that the writing systems of the Old World or the Maya Script
could. Therefore, Aztec writing was not meant to be read, but to be told. The elaborate codices were essentially pictographic aids for memorizing texts, which include genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists. Three kinds of signs were used in the system: pictures used as mnemonic
s (which do not represent particular words), logogram
s which represent whole words (instead of phoneme
s or syllable
s), and logograms used only for their sound values (i.e. used according to the rebus
principle).
The Spanish introduced the Roman script, which was used to record a large body of Aztec prose, poetry and mundane documentation such as testaments, administrative documents, legal letters, etc. In a matter of decades pictorial writing was completely replaced with the Latin alphabet. No standardized Latin orthography has been developed for Nahuatl, and no general consensus has arisen for the representation of many sounds in Nahuatl that are lacking in Spanish, such as long vowels and the glottal stop
. The orthography most accurately representing the phonemes of Nahuatl was developed in the 17th century by the Jesuit Horacio Carochi
. Carochi's orthography used two different accents: a macron
to represent long vowels and a grave
for the saltillo, and sometimes an acute accent for short vowels. This orthography did not achieve a wide following outside of the Jesuit community.
When Nahuatl became the subject of focused linguistic studies in the 20th century, linguists acknowledged the need to represent all the phonemes of the language. Several practical orthographies were developed to transcribe the language, many using the Americanist transcription
system. With the establishment of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas
in 2004, new attempts to create standardized orthographies for the different dialects were resumed; however to this day there is no single official orthography for Nahuatl. Apart from dialectal differences, major issues in transcribing Nahuatl include:
, extensive corpus of surviving literature in Nahuatl dating as far back as the 16th century may be considered unique. Nahuatl literature encompasses a diverse array of genres and styles, the documents themselves composed under many different circumstances. It appears that the preconquest Nahua had a distinction much like the European distinction between "prose
" and "poetry
", the first called tlahtolli "speech" and the second cuicatl "song".
Nahuatl tlahtolli prose has been preserved in different forms. Annals and chronicles recount history, normally written from the perspective of a particular altepetl
(locally based polity
) and often combining mythical accounts with real events. Important works in this genre include those from Chalco
written by Chimalpahin, from Tlaxcala
by Diego Muñoz Camargo
, from Mexico-Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc
and those of Texcoco by Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl
. Many annals recount history year-by-year and are normally written by anonymous authors. These works are sometimes evidently based on pre-Columbian pictorial year counts that existed, such as the Cuauhtitlan
annals and the Anales de Tlatelolco
. Purely mythological narratives are also found, like the "Legend of the Five Suns
", the Aztec creation myth recounted in Codex Chimalpopoca.
One of the most important works of prose written in Nahuatl is the twelve-volume compilation generally known as the Florentine Codex
, produced in the mid-16th century by the Franciscan
missionary Bernardino de Sahagún
with the help of a number of Nahua informants
. With this work Sahagún bestowed an enormous ethnographic description of the Nahua, written in side-by-side translations of Nahuatl and Spanish and illustrated throughout by color plates drawn by indigenous painters. Its volumes cover a diverse range of topics: Aztec history, material culture, social organization, religious and ceremonial life, rhetorical style and metaphors. The twelfth volume provides an indigenous perspective on the conquest itself. Sahagún also made a point of trying to document the richness of the Nahuatl language, stating:
Nahuatl poetry is preserved in principally two sources: the Cantares Mexicanos
and the Romances de los señores de Nueva España
, both collections of Aztec songs written down in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some songs may have been preserved through oral tradition from pre-conquest times until the time of their writing, for example the songs attributed to the poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl
. Lockhart and Karttunen identify more than four distinct styles of songs, e.g. the icnocuicatl ("sad song"), the xopancuicatl ("song of spring"), melahuaccuicatl ("plain song") and yaocuicatl ("song of war"), each with distinct stylistic traits. Aztec poetry makes rich use of metaphoric imagery and themes and are lamentation of the brevity of human existence, the celebration of valiant warriors who die in battle, and the appreciation of the beauty of life.
s consisting of two parallel phrases. For example:
Another kind of parallelism used is referred to by modern linguists as difrasismo
, in which two phrases are symbolically combined to give a metaphor
ical reading. Classical Nahuatl was rich in such diphrasal metaphors, many of which are explicated by Sahagún in the Florentine Codex and by Andrés de Olmos
' in his Arte. Such difrasismos include:
in 1918 in order to convince the Nahua towns in the area of Tlaxcala to join the Revolution
against the regime of Venustiano Carranza
. The orthography employed in the letter is improvised, and does not distinguish long vowels and only sporadically marks "" (with both
Grammars of Classical Nahuatl
Modern Dialects
Miscellaneous
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
. Collectively they are spoken by an estimated Nahua people, most of whom live in Central Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
. All Nahuan languages
Nahuan languages
The Nahuan or Aztecan languages are those languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family that have undergone the sound change known as Whorf's Law changing the original /*t/ to before */a/...
are indigenous to Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...
.
Nahuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD. It was the language of the Aztec
Aztec
The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.Aztec is the...
s, who dominated what is now central Mexico during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology
Mesoamerican chronology
Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica into several periods: the Paleo-Indian , the Archaic , the Preclassic , the Classic , and the Postclassic...
. During the preceding century and a half, the expansion and influence of the Aztec Empire had led to the variety spoken by the residents of Tenochtitlan becoming a prestige language
Prestige dialect
In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community. The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society...
in Mesoamerica. With the introduction of the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, Nahuatl also became a literary language
Literary language
A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...
and many chronicle
Chronicle
Generally a chronicle is a historical account of facts and events ranged in chronological order, as in a time line. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events, the purpose being the recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the...
s, grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
s, works of poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, administrative document
Document
The term document has multiple meanings in ordinary language and in scholarship. WordNet 3.1. lists four meanings :* document, written document, papers...
s and codices
Aztec codices
Aztec codices are books written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best primary sources for Aztec culture....
were written in the 16th and 17th centuries. This early literary language based on the Tenochtitlan variety has been labeled Classical Nahuatl
Classical Nahuatl
Classical Nahuatl is a term used to describe the variants of the Nahuatl language that were spoken in the Valley of Mexico — and central Mexico as a lingua franca — at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Mexico...
and is among the most studied and best documented languages of the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
.
Today Nahuatl varieties
Nahuatl dialects
The many dialects of the Nahuatl language belong to the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, and form a group of linguistic varieties spoken in central Mexico...
See Mesoamerican languages#Language vs. Dialect for a discussion on the difference between "languages" and "dialects" in Mesoamerica. are spoken in scattered communities mostly in rural areas. There are considerable differences among varieties, and some are mutually unintelligible
Mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort...
. They have all been subject to varying degrees of influence
Language contact
Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...
from Spanish. No modern Nahuatl languages are identical to Classical Nahuatl, but those spoken in and around the Valley of Mexico
Valley of Mexico
The Valley of Mexico is a highlands plateau in central Mexico roughly coterminous with the present-day Distrito Federal and the eastern half of the State of Mexico. Surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico was a centre for several pre-Columbian civilizations, including...
are generally more closely related to it than those on the periphery. Under Mexico's Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ("General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples") promulgated in 2003, Nahuatl along with the other indigenous languages of Mexico are recognized as lenguas nacionales ("national languages") in the regions where they are spoken, enjoying the same status as Spanish within their region.By the provisions of Article IV: Las lenguas indígenas...y el español son lenguas nacionales...y tienen la misma validez en su territorio, localización y contexto en que se hablen. ("The indigenous languages...and Spanish are national languages...and have the same validity in their territory, location and context in which they are spoken.")
Nahuatl is a language with a complex morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
characterized by polysynthesis
Polysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
and agglutination
Agglutination
In contemporary linguistics, agglutination usually refers to the kind of morphological derivation in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between affixes and syntactical categories. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages...
(agglutinative language
Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...
), allowing the construction of long words with complex meanings out of several stems and affix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
es. Nahuatl has been influenced by other Mesoamerican languages
Mesoamerican languages
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and...
through centuries of coexistence, and with them forms the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area
Mesoamerican Linguistic Area
The Mesoamerican Linguistic Area is a sprachbund containing many of the languages natively spoken in the cultural area of Mesoamerica. This sprachbund is defined by an array of syntactic, lexical and phonological traits as well as a number of ethnolinguistic traits found in the languages of...
.
Many words from Nahuatl have been borrowed into Spanish and thence have diffused into hundreds of other languages. Most of these loanwords denote things indigenous to central Mexico which the Spanish heard mentioned for the first time by their Nahuatl names. English words of Nahuatl origin include "avocado
Avocado
The avocado is a tree native to Central Mexico, classified in the flowering plant family Lauraceae along with cinnamon, camphor and bay laurel...
", "chayote
Chayote
The chayote , also known as christophene, vegetable pear, mirliton, pear squash, christophine , chouchoute , choko , starprecianté, citrayota, citrayote , chuchu , chow chow , cho cho , sayote ,...
", "chili
Chili pepper
Chili pepper is the fruit of plants from the genus Capsicum, members of the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The term in British English and in Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia and other Asian countries is just chilli without pepper.Chili peppers originated in the Americas...
", "chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC...
", "coyote
Coyote
The coyote , also known as the American jackal or the prairie wolf, is a species of canine found throughout North and Central America, ranging from Panama in the south, north through Mexico, the United States and Canada...
", "axolotl
Axolotl
The axolotl , Ambystoma mexicanum, is a neotenic salamander, closely related to the Tiger Salamander. Larvae of this species fail to undergo metamorphosis, so the adults remain aquatic and gilled. It is also called ajolote...
" and "tomato
Tomato
The word "tomato" may refer to the plant or the edible, typically red, fruit which it bears. Originating in South America, the tomato was spread around the world following the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and its many varieties are now widely grown, often in greenhouses in cooler...
".
The place of Nahuatl within Uto-Aztecan
In the past the branch of Uto-Aztecan to which Nahuatl belongs was called "Aztecan". From the 1990s on, the alternative designation "Nahuan" has been frequently used as a replacement especially in Spanish language publications. Since the monograph of Lyle CampbellLyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell is a linguist and leading expert on indigenous American languages—especially those of Mesoamerica—and on historical linguistics in general. He also has expertise in Uralic languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.-Life and...
and Ronald Langacker
Ronald Langacker
Ronald Wayne Langacker is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of Cognitive Grammar....
(1978), the Nahuan (Aztecan) branch of Uto-Aztecan is widely accepted as having two divisions, "General Aztec" and Pochutec.
General Aztec encompasses the Nahuatl and Pipil
Pipil language
Pipil is a Uto-Aztecan language descended from Nahuatl which was spoken in several parts of present day Central America before the Spanish conquest. It is on the verge of extinction in western El Salvador and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America...
languages."General Aztec is a generally accepted term referring to the most shallow common stage, reconstructed for all present-day Nahuatl varieties; it does not include the Pochutec dialect (Campbell & Langacker 1978)." Canger 2000:385 (Note 4) Pochutec is a scantily attested language which went extinct in the 20th century. The notion that Pochutec should not be considered a variety of Nahuatl was already several decades old, but Campbell and Langacker adduced new arguments for it. Other researchers maintain that Pochutec should be considered a divergent variant of the western periphery.
"Nahuatl" denotes at least Classical Nahuatl together with related modern languages spoken in Mexico. The inclusion of Pipil (Nawat) into the group is slightly controversial. Lyle Campbell, who has worked intensively with the Pipil language, classifies Pipil as separate from the Nahuatl branch within general Aztecan, whereas dialectologists like Una Canger
Una Canger
Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area...
, Karen Dakin and Yolanda Lastra
Yolanda Lastra
Yolanda Lastra de Suárez is a Mexican linguist specializing in the descriptive linguistics of the indigenous languages of Mexico. She obtained her PhD degree in 1963 from Cornell University, her dissertation written under the guidance of Charles F...
prefer to include Pipil in the General Aztecan branch, citing close historical ties with the so-called eastern peripheral dialects of General Aztec.
Pre-Columbian period
On the issue of geographic origin, linguists during the 20th century agreed that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in the southwestern United StatesSouthwestern United States
The Southwestern United States is a region defined in different ways by different sources. Broad definitions include nearly a quarter of the United States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah...
. Evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory also supports the southward diffusion thesis, specifically that speakers of early Nahuan languages migrated from the northern Mexican deserts
Aridoamerica
Aridoamerica, also known as the Gran Chichimeca, is a term used by Mexican archeologists to describe a region of the southwestern United States and the northern and central regions of Mexico, in contrast to Mesoamerica, which lies to the south and east...
into central Mexico in several waves. But recently, the traditional assessment has been challenged by Jane H. Hill
Jane H. Hill
Jane Hassler Hill is an American anthropologist and linguist who has worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1966...
, who proposes instead that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in central Mexico and spread northwards at a very early date. This hypothesis and the analyses of data that it rests upon has received serious criticism.
The purported migration of speakers of the Proto-Nahuan language into the Mesoamerican region has been placed at sometime around AD 500, towards the end of the Early Classic period in Mesoamerican chronology
Mesoamerican chronology
Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica into several periods: the Paleo-Indian , the Archaic , the Preclassic , the Classic , and the Postclassic...
. Before reaching the central altiplano, pre-Nahuan groups probably spent a period of time in contact with the Coracholan languages
Coracholan languages
Coracholan is a grouping of languages within the Uto-Aztecan language family. The living members of Coracholan are the Huichol and Cora languages, spoken by communities in Jalisco and Nayarit, states in central Mexico.Coracholan languages are Mesoamerican languages, and display many of the traits...
Cora
Cora language
The Cora language is an indigenous language of Mexico of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken by the ethnic group that is widely known as the Cora but who refer to themselves as Naáyarite. The Cora inhabit the northern sierra of the Mexican state Nayarit which is named after its indigenous...
and Huichol
Huichol language
The Huichol language is an indigenous language of Mexico which belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken by the ethnic group widely known as the Huichol , whose mountainous territory extends over portions of the Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and Durango, mostly in Jalisco...
of northwestern Mexico (which are also Uto-Aztecan).
The major political and cultural center of Mesoamerica in the Early Classic period was Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan – also written Teotihuacán, with a Spanish orthographic accent on the last syllable – is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, just 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas...
. The identity of the language(s) spoken by Teotihuacan's founders has long been debated, with the relationship of Nahuatl to Teotihuacan being prominent in that enquiry. While in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was presumed that Teotihuacan had been founded by speakers of Nahuatl, later linguistic and archaeological research tended to disconfirm this view. Instead, the timing of the Nahuatl influx was seen to coincide more closely with Teotihuacan's fall than its rise, and other candidates such as Totonacan
Totonacan languages
The Totonacan languages are a family of closely related languages spoken by approximately 200,000 Totonac and Tepehua people in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico...
identified as more likely. But recently, evidence from Mayan epigraphy
Epigraphy
Epigraphy Epigraphy Epigraphy (from the , literally "on-writing", is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be...
of possible Nahuatl loanwords in Mayan languages has been interpreted as demonstrating that other Mesoamerican languages may have been borrowing words from Proto-Nahuan (or its early descendants) significantly earlier than previously thought, bolstering the possibility of a significant Nahuatl presence at Teotihuacan.
In Mesoamerica the Mayan
Mayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
, Oto-Manguean
Oto-Manguean languages
Oto-Manguean languages are a large family comprising several families of Native American languages. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica.The...
and Mixe–Zoquean language families had coexisted for millennia. This had given rise to the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area
Mesoamerican Linguistic Area
The Mesoamerican Linguistic Area is a sprachbund containing many of the languages natively spoken in the cultural area of Mesoamerica. This sprachbund is defined by an array of syntactic, lexical and phonological traits as well as a number of ethnolinguistic traits found in the languages of...
(a linguistic area being one where a set of language traits have become common among the area's language by diffusion and not by evolution within a set of languages belonging to a common genetic subgrouping). After the Nahuas migrated into the Mesoamerican cultural zone, their language too adopted some of the traits defining the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. Examples of such adopted traits are the use of relational noun
Relational noun
Relational nouns or relator nouns are a class of words used in many languages. They are characterized as functioning syntactically as nouns, although they convey the meaning for which other languages use adpositions...
s, the appearance of calque
Calque
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
s, or loan translations, and a form of possessive construction typical of Mesoamerican languages.
A language which was the ancestor of Pochutec
Pochutec
Pochutec is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language of the Nahuan branch which was spoken in and around the town of Pochutla on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. In 1917 it was documented in a monograph by Franz Boas, who considered the language nearly extinct...
split from Proto-Nahuan (or Proto-Aztecan) possibly as early as AD 400, arriving in Mesoamerica a few centuries earlier than the main bulk of speakers of Nahuan languages. Some Nahuan groups migrated south along the Central America
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
n isthmus, reaching perhaps as far as Nicaragua. The moribund Pipil language
Pipil language
Pipil is a Uto-Aztecan language descended from Nahuatl which was spoken in several parts of present day Central America before the Spanish conquest. It is on the verge of extinction in western El Salvador and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America...
of El Salvador is the only living descendant of the variety of Nahuatl once spoken south of present day Mexico.
Beginning in the 7th century Nahuan speakers rose to power in central Mexico. The people of the Toltec
Toltec
The Toltec culture is an archaeological Mesoamerican culture that dominated a state centered in Tula, Hidalgo in the early post-classic period of Mesoamerican chronology...
culture of Tula, Hidalgo
Tula, Hidalgo
Tula, formally, Tula de Allende, is a town and one of the 84 municipalities of Hidalgo, in central-eastern Mexico. The municipality covers an area of 305.8 km² , and as of 2005, the municipality had a total population of 93,296, with 28,432 in the town...
, which was active in central Mexico around the 10th century, are thought to have been Nahuatl speakers. By the 11th century, Nahuatl speakers were dominant in the Valley of Mexico
Valley of Mexico
The Valley of Mexico is a highlands plateau in central Mexico roughly coterminous with the present-day Distrito Federal and the eastern half of the State of Mexico. Surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico was a centre for several pre-Columbian civilizations, including...
and far beyond, with settlements including Azcapotzalco
Azcapotzalco
Azcapotzalco is one of the 16 delegaciones into which Mexico's Federal District is divided. Azcapotzalco is in the northwestern part of Mexico City...
, Colhuacan
Culhuacan
Culhuacan or Colhuacan was one of the Nahuatl-speaking pre-Columbian city-states of the Valley of Mexico. According to tradition, Culhuacan was founded by the Toltecs under Mixcoatl and was the first Toltec city...
and Cholula
Cholula (Mesoamerican site)
Cholula , was an important city of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, dating back to at least the 2nd century BCE, with settlement as a village going back at least some thousand years earlier. The great site of Cholula stands just west of the modern city of Puebla. Its immense pyramid exceeds the Pyramid...
rising to prominence. Nahua migrations into the region from the north continued into the Postclassic
Mesoamerican chronology
Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica into several periods: the Paleo-Indian , the Archaic , the Preclassic , the Classic , and the Postclassic...
period. One of the last of these migrations to arrive in the Valley of Mexico settled on an island in the Lake Texcoco
Lake Texcoco
Lake Texcoco was a natural lake formation within the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs built the city of Tenochtitlan on an island in the lake. The Spaniards built Mexico City over Tenochtitlan...
and proceeded to subjugate the surrounding tribes. This group was the Mexica
Mexica
The Mexica were a pre-Columbian people of central Mexico.Mexica may also refer to:*Mexica , a board game designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling*Mexica , a 2005 novel by Norman Spinrad...
(or Mexihka), who over the course of the next three centuries founded an empire named Tenochtitlan. Their political and linguistic influence came to extend into Central America and Nahuatl became a lingua franca
Lingua franca
A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
among merchants and elites in Mesoamerica, e.g., among the Quiché (K'iche') Maya.
Colonial period
With the arrival of the SpanishSpanish Empire
The Spanish Empire comprised territories and colonies administered directly by Spain in Europe, in America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. It originated during the Age of Exploration and was therefore one of the first global empires. At the time of Habsburgs, Spain reached the peak of its world power....
in 1519, the tables were turned on the Nahuatl language: it was displaced as the dominant regional language. Nevertheless, due to the Spanish making alliances with first the Nahuatl speakers from Tlaxcala
Tlaxcala (Nahua state)
Tlaxcala was a pre-Columbian city state of central Mexico.Tlaxcala was a confederation of four altepetl — Ocotelolco, Quiahuiztlan, Tepeticpac and Tizatlan — which each took turns providing a ruler for Tlaxcala as a whole.-History:Tlaxcala was never conquered by the Aztec empire, but was...
and later with the conquered Aztecs, the Nahuatl language continued spreading throughout Mesoamerica in the decades after the conquest, when Spanish expeditions with thousands of Nahua soldiers marched north and south to conquer new territories. Jesuit missions in northern Mexico and the southwestern US
Southwestern United States
The Southwestern United States is a region defined in different ways by different sources. Broad definitions include nearly a quarter of the United States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah...
region often included a barrio
Barrio
Barrio is a Spanish word meaning district or neighborhood.-Usage:In its formal usage in English, barrios are generally considered cohesive places, sharing, for example, a church and traditions such as feast days...
of Tlaxcaltec soldiers who remained to guard the mission. For example, some fourteen years after the northeastern city of Saltillo, Coahuila, was founded in 1577, a Tlaxcaltec community was resettled in a separate nearby village, San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala
San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala
San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala was a Tlaxcalan municipality in what is now the Mexican state of Coahuila. San Esteban was the northernmost of the six Tlaxcalan colonies established in 1591 at the behest of viceroy Luis de Velasco; its founders came from Tizatlan....
to cultivate the land and aid colonization efforts that had stalled in the face of local hostility to the Spanish settlement. As for the conquest of modern day Central America, Pedro de Alvarado
Pedro de Alvarado
Pedro de Alvarado y Contreras was a Spanish conquistador and governor of Guatemala. He participated in the conquest of Cuba, in Juan de Grijalva's exploration of the coasts of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, and in the conquest of Mexico led by Hernan Cortes...
conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec allies, who then settled outside of modern day Antigua
Antigua Guatemala
Antigua Guatemala is a city in the central highlands of Guatemala famous for its well-preserved Spanish Mudéjar-influenced Baroque architecture as well as a number of spectacular ruins of colonial churches...
. Similar episodes occurred across El Salvador
El Salvador
El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...
and Honduras
Honduras
Honduras is a republic in Central America. It was previously known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize...
, with Nahuatl speakers settling in communities that were often named after them. In Honduras for example, two of these barrios are called "Mexicapa"; another in El Salvador is called "Mejicanos". Nahua soldiers formed the bulk of the Spanish forces which conquered the Philippines and even today Chavacano
Chavacano language
Chavacano or Chabacano, sometimes referred to by linguists as Philippine Creole Spanish, is a Spanish-based creole language spoken in the Philippines...
, a Spanish based creole spoken in the Philippines, has many Nahuatl words.
Friar
A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders.-Friars and monks:...
s, Dominican
Dominican Order
The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...
friars, and Jesuits) introduced the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
to the Nahuas. Within the first twenty years after the Spanish arrival, texts were being prepared in the Nahuatl language written in Latin characters. Simultaneously, schools were founded, such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco
Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco
The Real Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico, was the first European school of higher learning in the Americas. The school was built by the Franciscan order on the initiative of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and Bishop Juan de Zumárraga on the site of an Aztec school, for the children of nobles...
in 1536, which taught both indigenous and classical European languages to both Indians and priest
Priest
A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities...
s. Missionary grammarians undertook the writing of grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
sColonial Spanish grammars of indigenous languages were often called "artes", arte being the word for "art" in the sense of "manner". of indigenous languages for use by priests. The first Nahuatl grammar, written by Andrés de Olmos
Andrés de Olmos
Andrés de Olmos , Franciscan priest and extraordinary grammarian and ethno-historian of Mexico's Indians, was born in Oña, Burgos, Spain, and died in Tampico in New Spain...
, was published in 1547—three years before the first French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
grammar. By 1645 four more had been published, authored respectively by Alonso de Molina
Alonso de Molina
Alonso de Molina was a Franciscan priest and grammarian, who wrote a well-known dictionary of the Nahuatl language published in 1571....
(1571), Antonio del Rincón
Antonio del Rincón
Antonio del Rincón was a Jesuit priest and grammarian, who wrote one of the earliest grammars of the Nahuatl language...
(1595), Diego de Galdo Guzmán (1642), and Horacio Carochi
Horacio Carochi
Horacio Carochi was an Italian Jesuit priest and grammarian who was born in Florence, Italy, and died in Mexico. He is known for his grammar of the Classical Nahuatl language.- Life:...
(1645). Carochi's is today considered the most important of the colonial era grammars of Nahuatl.
In 1570 King Philip II of Spain
Philip II of Spain
Philip II was King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and, while married to Mary I, King of England and Ireland. He was lord of the Seventeen Provinces from 1556 until 1581, holding various titles for the individual territories such as duke or count....
decreed that Nahuatl should become the official language of the colonies of New Spain
New Spain
New Spain, formally called the Viceroyalty of New Spain , was a viceroyalty of the Spanish colonial empire, comprising primarily territories in what was known then as 'América Septentrional' or North America. Its capital was Mexico City, formerly Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire...
in order to facilitate communication between the Spanish and natives of the colonies. This led to the Spanish missionaries teaching Nahuatl to Indians living as far south as Honduras
Honduras
Honduras is a republic in Central America. It was previously known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize...
and El Salvador
El Salvador
El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...
. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Classical Nahuatl was used as a literary language, and a large corpus of texts from that period is in existence today. Texts from this period include histories, chronicles, poetry, theatrical works, Christian canonical works, ethnographic descriptions, and administrative documents. The Spanish permitted a great deal of autonomy in the local administration of indigenous towns during this period, and in many Nahuatl speaking towns Nahuatl was the de facto administrative language both in writing and speech. A large body of Nahuatl literature was composed during this period, including the Florentine Codex
Florentine Codex
The Florentine Codex is the common name given to a 16th century ethnographic research project in Mesoamerica by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Bernardino originally titled it: La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana...
, a twelve-volume compendium of Aztec culture compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún
Bernardino de Sahagún
Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain . Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529, and spent more than 50 years conducting interviews regarding Aztec...
; Crónica Mexicayotl
Crónica Mexicayotl
The Crónica Mexicayotl is a chronicle of the Aztec empire that was written in the Nahuatl language by Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc around 1598. Given that its author belonged to the Aztec royal lineage, the manuscript documents the Aztec version of the history of central Mexico. It was written in...
, a chronicle of the royal lineage of Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc
Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc
Fernando or Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc was a colonial Nahua noble. A son of Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin and Francisca de Moctezuma , Tezozómoc worked as an interpreter for the Real Audiencia...
; Cantares Mexicanos
Cantares Mexicanos
The Cantares Mexicanos is the name given to a manuscript collection of Nahuatl songs or poems recorded in the 16th century. The 91 songs of the Cantares form the largest Nahuatl song collection, containg over half of all known traditional Nahuatl songs...
, a collection of songs in Nahuatl; a Nahuatl-Spanish/Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary compiled by Alonso de Molina
Alonso de Molina
Alonso de Molina was a Franciscan priest and grammarian, who wrote a well-known dictionary of the Nahuatl language published in 1571....
; and the Huei tlamahuiçoltica
Huei tlamahuiçoltica
Huei tlamahuiçoltica omonexiti in ilhuicac tlatocaçihuapilli Santa Maria totlaçonantzin Guadalupe in nican huei altepenahuac Mexico itocayocan Tepeyacac Huei tlamahuiçoltica omonexiti in ilhuicac tlatocaçihuapilli Santa Maria totlaçonantzin Guadalupe in nican huei altepenahuac Mexico itocayocan...
, a description in Nahuatl of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe , also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe is a celebrated Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary.According to tradition, on December 9, 1531 Juan Diego, a simple indigenous peasant, had a vision of a young woman while he was on a hill in the Tepeyac desert, near Mexico City. The lady...
.
Grammars and dictionaries of indigenous languages were composed throughout the colonial period, but their quality was highest in the initial period. The friars found that learning all the indigenous languages was impossible in practice, so they concentrated on Nahuatl. For a time, the linguistic situation in Mesoamerica remained relatively stable, but in 1696 King Charles II
Charles II of Spain
Charles II was the last Habsburg King of Spain and the ruler of large parts of Italy, the Spanish territories in the Southern Low Countries, and Spain's overseas Empire, stretching from the Americas to the Spanish East Indies...
issued a decree
Decree
A decree is a rule of law issued by a head of state , according to certain procedures . It has the force of law...
banning the use of any language other than Spanish throughout the Spanish Empire
Spanish Empire
The Spanish Empire comprised territories and colonies administered directly by Spain in Europe, in America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. It originated during the Age of Exploration and was therefore one of the first global empires. At the time of Habsburgs, Spain reached the peak of its world power....
. In 1770 another decree, calling for the elimination of the indigenous languages, did away with Classical Nahuatl as a literary language.
Modern period
| Region | Totals | Percentages |
|---|---|---|
| Federal District | 37,450 | 0.44% |
| Guerrero Guerrero Guerrero officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Guerrero is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 81 municipalities and its capital city is Chilpancingo.... |
136,681 | 4.44% |
| Hidalgo | 221,684 | 9.92% |
| Mexico (state) | 55,802 | 0.43% |
| Morelos Morelos Morelos officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Morelos is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 33 municipalities and its capital city is Cuernavaca.... |
18,656 | 1.20% |
| Oaxaca Oaxaca Oaxaca , , officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca is one of the 31 states which, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided into 571 municipalities; of which 418 are governed by the system of customs and traditions... |
10,979 | 0.32% |
| Puebla Puebla Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla.... |
416,968 | 8.21% |
| San Luis Potosí San Luis Potosí San Luis Potosí officially Estado Libre y Soberano de San Luis Potosí is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 58 municipalities and its capital city is San Luis Potosí.... |
138,523 | 6.02% |
| Tlaxcala Tlaxcala Tlaxcala officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Tlaxcala is one of the 31 states which along with the Federal District comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided into 60 municipalities and its capital city is Tlaxcala.... |
23,737 | 2.47% |
| Veracruz Veracruz Veracruz, formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave , is one of the 31 states that, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided in 212 municipalities and its capital city is... |
338,324 | 4.90% |
| Rest of Mexico | 50,132 | 0.10% |
| Total: | 1,448,937 | 1.49% |
Throughout the modern period the situation of indigenous languages has grown increasingly precarious in Mexico, and the numbers of speakers of virtually all indigenous languages have dwindled. Although the absolute number of Nahuatl speakers has actually risen over the past century, indigenous populations have become increasingly marginalized in Mexican society. In 1895, Nahuatl was spoken by over 5% of the population. By 2000, this proportion had fallen to 1.49%. Given the process of marginalization combined with the trend of migration to urban areas and to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, some linguists are warning of impending language death
Language death
In linguistics, language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety...
. At present Nahuatl is mostly spoken in rural areas by an impoverished class of indigenous subsistence agriculturists. According to the Mexican national statistics institute, INEGI, 51% of Nahuatl speakers are involved in the farming sector and 6 in 10 receive no wages or less than the minimum wage.
From the early 20th century to at least the mid-1980s, educational policies in Mexico focused on the hispanization (castellanización) of indigenous communities, teaching only Spanish and discouraging the use of indigenous languages. As a result, today there is no group of Nahuatl speakers having attained general literacy in Nahuatl; while their literacy rate in Spanish also remains much lower than the national average. Even so, Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people, of whom around 10% are monolingual. The survival of Nahuatl dialects as a whole is not imminently endangered, but the survival of certain dialects is, and some dialects have already become extinct within the last few decades of the 20th century.
The 1990s saw the onset of diametric changes in official Mexican government policies towards indigenous and linguistic rights. Developments of accords in the international rights arenaSuch as the 1996 adoption at a world linguistics conference in Barcelona of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights is a document signed by UNESCO, the PEN Clubs, and several non-governmental organizations in 1996 to support linguistic rights, especially those of endangered languages...
, a declaration which "became a general reference point for the evolution and discussion of linguistic rights in Mexico" (Pellicer et al. 2006:132). combined with domestic pressuresSuch as social and political agitation by the EZLN and indigenous social movements. led to legislative reforms and the creation of decentralized government agencies like CDI and INALI
Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas
The Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas is a Mexican federal public agency, created 13 March 2003 by the enactment of the Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas by the administration of President Vicente Fox...
with responsibilities for the promotion and protection of indigenous communities and languages. In particular, the federal Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ["General Law on the Language Rights of the Indigenous Peoples", promulgated 13 March 2003] recognizes all the country's indigenous languages, including Nahuatl, as "national languages" and gives indigenous people the right to use them in all spheres of public and private life. In Article 11, it grants access to compulsory, bilingual and intercultural education
Intercultural bilingual education
Intercultural bilingual education or bilingual intercultural education is an intercultural and bilingual model of education designed for contexts with two cultures and languages in contact, in the typical case a dominant and an underprivileged culture...
.
In February 2008 the mayor of Mexico City
Head of Government of the Federal District
The Head of Government wields executive power in the Mexican Federal District.The Head of Government serves a six-year term, running concurrently with that of the President of the Republic....
, Marcelo Ebrard
Marcelo Ebrard
Marcelo Luis Ebrard Casaubón is the current Head of Government of the Federal District since December 5, 2006. He is a Mexican politician affiliated to the Party of the Democratic Revolution who served as Secretary-General of the former Mexican Federal District Department, minister of public...
, launched a drive to have all government employees learn Nahuatl. Ebrard stated he would continue institutionalizing Nahuatl and that it was important for Mexico to remember its history and its tradition.
Geographic distribution
Nahuatl dialects
The many dialects of the Nahuatl language belong to the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, and form a group of linguistic varieties spoken in central Mexico...
is currently spoken in an area stretching from the northern state of Durango
Durango
Durango officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Durango is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. The state is located in Northwest Mexico. With a population of 1,632,934, it has Mexico's second-lowest population density, after Baja...
to Veracruz
Veracruz
Veracruz, formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave , is one of the 31 states that, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided in 212 municipalities and its capital city is...
in the southeast. Pipil
Pipil language
Pipil is a Uto-Aztecan language descended from Nahuatl which was spoken in several parts of present day Central America before the Spanish conquest. It is on the verge of extinction in western El Salvador and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America...
(also known as Nawat), the southernmost Nahuan language, is spoken in El Salvador
El Salvador
El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...
by a small number of speakers. According to IRIN-International, the Nawat Language Recovery Initiative project, there are no reliable figures for the contemporary numbers of speakers of Pipil / Nawat. Numbers may range anywhere from "perhaps a few hundred people, perhaps only a few dozen."
Based on figures accumulated by INEGI from the national census conducted in 2000, Nahuatl is spoken by an estimated 1.45 million people, some 198,000 (14.9%) of whom are monolingual.In this analysis, monolinguals are counted as those who do not speak Spanish. It may be possible that some also speak other Nahuatl variants, or other indigenous languages. There is gender disparity in monolingualism, with females representing nearly two thirds of all monolinguals. The states of Guerrero and Hidalgo have the highest rates of monolingual Nahuatl speakers as a proportion of the total Nahuatl speaking population, calculated at 24.2% and 22.6%, respectively. The proportion of monolinguals for most other states is less than 5%. Put another way, more than 95% of the Nahuatl speaking population in most states speaks at least one other language, usually Spanish; nationally, the figure is about 86% of the total.
The largest concentrations of Nahuatl speakers are found in the states of Puebla
Puebla
Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla....
, Veracruz
Veracruz
Veracruz, formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave , is one of the 31 states that, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided in 212 municipalities and its capital city is...
, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí
San Luis Potosí
San Luis Potosí officially Estado Libre y Soberano de San Luis Potosí is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 58 municipalities and its capital city is San Luis Potosí....
, and Guerrero
Guerrero
Guerrero officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Guerrero is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 81 municipalities and its capital city is Chilpancingo....
. Significant populations are also found in Mexico State, Morelos
Morelos
Morelos officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Morelos is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 33 municipalities and its capital city is Cuernavaca....
, and the Federal District, with smaller communities in Michoacán
Michoacán
Michoacán officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Michoacán de Ocampo is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 113 municipalities and its capital city is Morelia...
and Durango
Durango
Durango officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Durango is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. The state is located in Northwest Mexico. With a population of 1,632,934, it has Mexico's second-lowest population density, after Baja...
. Nahuatl became extinct during the 20th century in the states of Jalisco
Jalisco
Jalisco officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Jalisco is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is located in Western Mexico and divided in 125 municipalities and its capital city is Guadalajara.It is one of the more important states...
and Colima
Colima
Colima is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, make up the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It shares its name with its capital and main city, Colima....
. As a result of internal migrations within the country, Nahuatl speaking communities exist in all of Mexico's states. The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
has resulted in the establishment of a few small Nahuatl speaking communities in that country, particularly in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
, New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
and Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
.
Terminology
The terminology used to describe varieties of spoken Nahuatl is inconsistently applied. Many terms are used with multiple denotations, or a single dialect grouping goes under several names. Sometimes older terms are substituted with newer terms or the speakers' own name for their specific variety. The word Nahuatl is itself a Nahuatl word, probably derived from the word nāwatlahtolli ("clear language"). The language was formerly called "Aztec" because it was spoken by the Aztecs, who however didn't call themselves Aztecs but Mexica, and their language mexicacopa. Nowadays the term "Aztec" is rarely used for modern Nahuan languages, but the linguists' traditional name of "Aztecan" for the branch of Uto-Aztecan that comprises Nahuatl, Pipil, and Pochutec is still in use (although some linguists prefer a new name, "Nahuan"). Since 1978, the term "General Aztec" has been adopted by linguists to refer to the languages of the Aztecan branch excluding PochutecPochutec
Pochutec is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language of the Nahuan branch which was spoken in and around the town of Pochutla on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. In 1917 it was documented in a monograph by Franz Boas, who considered the language nearly extinct...
.
The speakers of Nahuatl themselves often refer to their language as either Mexicano or some word derived from mācēhualli, the Nahuatl word for "commoner". One example of the latter is the case for Nahuatl spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos
Tetelcingo, Morelos
Tetelcingo is a town in the Mexican state of Morelos. It is located about 6 kilometers north of the city of Cuautla, and because Cuautla has grown enormously, Tetelcingo, with its colonias , is practically swallowed up in the urban area.Tetelcingo is the homeland of a particularly interesting...
, whose speakers call their language mösiehuali. The Pipil of El Salvador do not call their own language "Pipil", as most linguists do, but rather nawat. The Nahuas of Durango
Durango
Durango officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Durango is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. The state is located in Northwest Mexico. With a population of 1,632,934, it has Mexico's second-lowest population density, after Baja...
call their language Mexicanero. Speakers of Nahuatl of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
Isthmus of Tehuantepec
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is an isthmus in Mexico. It represents the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and prior to the opening of the Panama Canal was a major shipping route known simply as the Tehuantepec Route...
call their language mela'tajtol ("the straight language"). Some speech communities use "Nahuatl" as the name for their language although this seems to be a recent innovation. Linguists commonly identify localized dialects of Nahuatl by adding as a qualifier the name of the village or area where that variety is spoken.
Dialectology
Current subclassification of Nahuatl rests on research by CangerUna Canger
Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area...
(1980, 1988) and Lastra de Suárez
Yolanda Lastra
Yolanda Lastra de Suárez is a Mexican linguist specializing in the descriptive linguistics of the indigenous languages of Mexico. She obtained her PhD degree in 1963 from Cornell University, her dissertation written under the guidance of Charles F...
(1986). Canger introduced the scheme of a Central grouping several Peripheral groupings, and Lastra confirmed this notion, differing in some details. Each of the groupings is defined by shared characteristic grammatical features which in turn suggest a shared history. Canger includes dialects of La Huasteca
La Huasteca
La Huasteca is the first climbing area in Monterrey, Mexico, only 15 minutes from the city. With nearly 200 bolted routes with grades from 5.8 to 5.13C, it is the favorite place for weekend climbers. It is also known for the slippery type of limestone from which it is comprised, and which makes...
in the Center Peripheral group, while Lastra de Suárez places them in their own subgroup of Peripheral. Below, Lastra de Suarez's classification is combined with Campbell
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell is a linguist and leading expert on indigenous American languages—especially those of Mesoamerica—and on historical linguistics in general. He also has expertise in Uralic languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.-Life and...
1997's classification of Uto-Aztecan. (Campbell's positing of higher level subgroupings of Uto-Aztecan, specifically "Shoshonean" and "Sonoran", above the eight uncontroversial branches is not yet generally accepted. Also, Lastra's including Pipil under Nahuatl is not accepted by Campbell, who has been the leading investigator of Pipil.)
- *Estimated split date by glottochronologyGlottochronologyGlottochronology is that part of lexicostatistics dealing with the chronological relationship between languages....
(BP = years Before Present).
Phonology
Nahuan is defined as a subgroup of Uto-Aztecan by having undergone a number of shared changes from the Uto-Aztecan protolanguageProto-Uto-Aztecan language
The Proto–Uto-Aztecan language is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Uto-Aztecan languages.-Vowels:Proto–Uto-Aztecan is reconstructed as having an unusual five-vowel system:...
(PUA). The table below shows the phonemic
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
inventory of Classical Nahuatl as an example of a typical Nahuan language. In some dialects the /t͡ɬ/ phoneme that is so common in classical Nahuatl has changed into either /t/ as it has happened in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl
Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl
Isthmus–Mecayapan Nahuatl or Isthmus Nahuat is a modern variety of Nahuatl spoken by about 20,000 people in Mecayapan and Tatahuicapan, Veracruz, Mexico.-Vowels:-Consonants:*Occur only as allophones....
, Mexicanero
Mexicanero
Mexicanero is the name used by the speakers of the variety of the Nahuatl language spoken in southern Durango to refer to their language. It is a member of the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It has around 1000 speakers in the remote towns of San Pedro Jícora and San Juan...
and Pipil
Pipil language
Pipil is a Uto-Aztecan language descended from Nahuatl which was spoken in several parts of present day Central America before the Spanish conquest. It is on the verge of extinction in western El Salvador and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America...
or into /l/ as it has happened in Nahuatl of Pómaro, Michoacán
Michoacán
Michoacán officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Michoacán de Ocampo is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 113 municipalities and its capital city is Morelia...
. Many dialects no longer distinguish between short and long vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s. Some have introduced completely new vowel qualities to compensate for this, as is the case for Tetelcingo Nahuatl
Tetelcingo Nahuatl
Tetelcingo Nahuatl, or Mösiehuali, is a Nahuatl variety spoken by 3,500 people in the town of Tetelcingo and its colonias, Colonia Cuauhtémoc and Colonia Lázaro Cárdenas, in Morelos, Mexico...
. Others have developed a pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
, such as Nahuatl of Oapan, Guerrero
Guerrero
Guerrero officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Guerrero is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 81 municipalities and its capital city is Chilpancingo....
. Many modern dialects have also borrowed phonemes from Spanish, such as /b, d, ɡ, f/.
Sounds
| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Post- alveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Labio- velar |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | p | t | k | kʷ | ʔ (h)* | ||
| Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :... |
t͡ɬ / t͡s | t͡ʃ | |||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
s | ʃ | |||||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | |||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
l | j | w |
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| long | short | long | short | long | short | |
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
iː | i | oː | o | ||
| Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel... |
eː | e | ||||
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
aː | a |
* The glottal phoneme (called the "saltilloSaltillo (linguistics)In Mexican linguistics, saltillo refers to a glottal stop consonant, . It was given that name by the early grammarians of Classical Nahuatl. In a number of other Nahuatl languages, the sound cognate to Classical Nahuatl’s glottal stop is , and the term saltillo is applied to either pronunciation...
") only occurs after vowels. In many modern dialects it is realized as an [h], but in classical Nahuatl and in other modern dialects it is a glottal stop [ʔ].
Most Nahuatl dialects have stress on the penultimate syllable of a word. In Mexicanero Nahuat from Durango, many unstressed syllables have disappeared from words, and the placement of syllable stress has become phonemic in this dialect (compare "present" and "present" in English).
Allophony
AllophonyAllophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
, in Nahuatl, is not very rich in most varieties. In many dialects the voiced consonants are often devoiced in wordfinal position and in consonant clusters: /j/ devoices to a voiceless palatal sibilant
Voiceless postalveolar fricative
The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or voiceless domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages, including English...
/ʃ/, /w/ devoices to a voiceless glottal fricative
Voiceless glottal fricative
The voiceless glottal transition, commonly called a "fricative", is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant phonologically, but often lacks the usual phonetic characteristics of a consonant...
[h] or to a voiceless labialized velar approximant [ʍ], and /l/ devoices to voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar fricatives is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is K...
[ɬ]. In some dialects the first consonant in almost any consonant cluster becomes [h]. Some dialects have productive lenition
Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
of voiceless
Voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, this is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word "phonation" implies voicing, and that voicelessness is the lack of...
consonants into their voiced counterparts between vowels. The nasals
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
are normally assimilated
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
to the place of articulation of a following consonant. The voiceless alveolar lateral affricate
Voiceless alveolar lateral affricate
The voiceless alveolar lateral affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is , and in Americanist phonetic notation it is .-Features:...
[t͡ɬ] is assimilated after /l/ and pronounced [l].
Phonotactics
Classical Nahuatl and most of the modern varieties have fairly simple phonological systems. They allow only syllables with maximally one initial and one final consonant. Consonant clusters only occur wordmedially and over syllable boundaries. Some morphemeMorpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s have two alternating forms, one with a vowel i to prevent consonant clusters, and one without. For example, the absolutive suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
has the variant forms – tli (used after consonants) and – tl (used after vowels). Some modern varieties however have formed complex clusters due to vowel loss. Others have contracted syllable sequences, causing accents to shift or vowels to become long.Sischo 1979:312 and Canger 2000 for a brief description of these phenomena in Nahual of Michoacán and Durango respectively
Reduplication
Many varieties of Nahuatl have productiveProductivity (linguistics)
In linguistics, productivity is the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation. Since use to produce novel structures is the clearest proof of usage of a grammatical process, the evidence most often appealed to as establishing productivity is...
reduplication
Reduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
. By reduplicating the first syllable of a root
Root (linguistics)
The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
a new word is formed. In nouns this is often used to form plurals, e.g. /tlaːkatl/ "man" > /tlaːtlaːkah/ "men", but also in some varieties to form diminutive
Diminutive
In language structure, a diminutive, or diminutive form , is a formation of a word used to convey a slight degree of the root meaning, smallness of the object or quality named, encapsulation, intimacy, or endearment...
s, honorific
Honorific
An honorific is a word or expression with connotations conveying esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person. Sometimes, the term is used not quite correctly to refer to an honorary title...
s, or for derivations
Derivation (linguistics)
In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...
. In verbs reduplication is often used to form a reiterative (expressing repetition), or to intensify the meaning of the verb. E.g. /kitta/ "he sees it", /kihitta/ "he looks at it repeatedly" and /kiːitta/ "he stares at it".
Grammar
The Nahuatl languages are agglutinativeAgglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...
, polysynthetic
Polysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
languages that make extensive use of compounding, incorporation and derivation. That is, they can add many different prefixes and suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es to a root
Root (linguistics)
The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
until very long words are formed – and a single word can constitute an entire sentence.
The following verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
shows how the verb is marked for subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
, patient
Patient (grammar)
In linguistics, a grammatical patient, also called the target or undergoer, is the participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out. A patient as differentiated from a theme must undergo a change in state. A theme is denoted by a stative verb, where a patient is denoted by a dynamic...
, object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
, and indirect object:
-
- /ni-mits-teː-tla-makiː-ltiː-s/
- I-you-someone-something-give-CAUSATIVE-FUTURE
- "I shall make somebody give something to you"All examples given in this section and subsections are from Suárez (1983:61–63) unless otherwise noted. Glosses have been standardized. (Classical Nahuatl)
Nouns
The Nahuatl noun has a relatively complex structure. The only obligatory inflections are for numberGrammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
(singular and plural) and possession (i.e., whether the noun is possessed, as is indicated by a prefix meaning 'my', 'your', etc.). Plural forms of nouns are normally formed by adding a suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
, although some words form irregular plurals by using reduplication
Reduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
. Nahuatl has neither case
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
nor gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
, but Classical Nahuatl and some modern dialects distinguish between animate
Animacy
Animacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun in a given taxonomic scheme is...
and inanimate nouns, the distinction manifesting with respect to pluralization. In Classical Nahuatl only animate nouns could take a plural form, whereas all inanimate nouns were uncountable (as the words "bread" and "money" are uncountable in English). Nowadays many dialects do not maintain this distinction and all nouns may take a plural inflection, although it is often the case that most inanimates, and even some animates, do not, i.e. their absolutive form can be understood as either singular or plural.
In most varieties of Nahuatl, most nouns in the unpossessed singular form take a suffix traditionally called an "absolutive". The most common forms of the absolutive are -tl after vowels, -tli after consonants other than l, and -li after l.
Noun compounds are commonly formed by combining two or more nominal stems, or combining a nominal stem with other an adjectival stem or a verbal stem.
Singular noun:
- kojo-tl
- coyote-ABSOLUTIVE
- "coyote" (Classical Nahuatl)
Plural animate noun:
- kojo-meh
- coyote-PLURAL
- "coyotes" (Classical Nahuatl)
Nahuatl distinguishes between possessed and unpossessed forms of nouns. The absolutive suffix is not used on possessed nouns. In all dialects, possessed nouns take a prefix agreeing with number and person of its possessor.
Absolutive noun:
- /kal-li/
- house-ABSOLUTIVE
- "house" (Classical Nahuatl)
Possessed noun:
- /no-kal/
- my-house
- "my house" (Classical Nahuatl)
Nahuatl does not have grammatical case
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
but uses what is sometimes called a relational noun
Relational noun
Relational nouns or relator nouns are a class of words used in many languages. They are characterized as functioning syntactically as nouns, although they convey the meaning for which other languages use adpositions...
to describe spatial (and other) relations. These morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s cannot appear alone but must always occur after a noun or a possessive prefix. They are also often called postpositions or locative suffixes. In some ways these locative constructions resemble, and can be thought of as, locative case constructions. Most modern dialects have incorporated prepositions from Spanish that are competing with or that have completely replaced relational nouns.
Uses of relational noun/postposition/locative -pan with a possessive prefix:
- no-pan
- my-in/on
- "in/on me" (Classical Nahuatl)
- iː-pan
- its-in/on
- "in/on it" (Classical Nahuatl)
- iː-pan kal-li
- its-in house-ABSOLUTIVE
- "in the house" (Classical Nahuatl)
Use with a preceding noun stem:
- kal-pan
- house-in
- "in the house" (Classical Nahuatl)
Pronouns
Nahuatl generally distinguishes three persons – both in the singular and plural numbers. In at least one modern dialect, the Isthmus-MecayapanIsthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl
Isthmus–Mecayapan Nahuatl or Isthmus Nahuat is a modern variety of Nahuatl spoken by about 20,000 people in Mecayapan and Tatahuicapan, Veracruz, Mexico.-Vowels:-Consonants:*Occur only as allophones....
variety, there has come to be a distinction between inclusive
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
(I/we and you) and exclusive
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
(we but not you) forms of the first person plural:
First person plural pronoun in Classical Nahuatl:
- tehwaːntin "we"
First person plural pronouns in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuat:
- nejamēn ([nehameːn]) "We but not you"
- tejamēn ([tehameːn]) "We including you (and others)"
Much more common is an honorific/non-honorific distinction, usually applied to second and third persons but not first.
Non-honorific forms:
- tehwaːtl "you sg."
- amehwaːntin "you pl."
- yehwatl "he/she/it"
Honorific forms
- tehwaːtzin "you sg. honorific"
- amehwaːntzitzin "you pl. honorific"
- yehwaːtzin "he/she honorific"
Verbs
The Nahuatl verb is quite complex and inflects for many grammatical categories. The verb is composed of a root, prefixPrefix
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the root of a word. Particularly in the study of languages,a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed.Examples of prefixes:...
es, and suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es. The prefixes indicate the person of the subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
, and person and number of the object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
and indirect object, whereas the suffixes indicate tense, aspect, mood and subject number.
Most Nahuatl dialects distinguish three tenses: present, past, and future, and two aspects: perfective
Perfective aspect
The perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...
and imperfective
Imperfective aspect
The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with internal structure, such as ongoing, habitual, repeated, and similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future...
. Some varieties add progressive
Continuous and progressive aspects
The continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects. It is a verb category with two principal meaning components: duration and incompletion...
or habitual aspects. All dialects distinguish at least the indicative and imperative moods, while some also have optative and vetative moods.
Most Nahuatl varieties have a number of ways to alter the valency
Valency (linguistics)
In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate...
of a verb. Classical Nahuatl had a passive voice, but this is not found in most modern varieties. However the applicative
Applicative voice
The applicative voice is a grammatical voice which promotes an oblique argument of a verb to the object argument, and indicates the oblique role within the meaning of the verb. When the applicative voice is applied to a verb, its valency may be increased by one...
and causative voices are found in many modern dialects. Many Nahuatl varieties also allow forming verbal compounds with two or more verbal roots.
The following verbal form has two verbal roots and is inflected for causative voice and both a direct and indirect object:
- ni-kin-tla-kwa-ltiː-s-neki
- I-them-something-eat-CAUSATIVE-FUTURE-want
- "I want to feed them" (Classical Nahuatl)
Some Nahuatl varieties, notably Classical Nahuatl, can inflect the verb to show the direction of the verbal action going away from or towards the speaker. Some also have specific inflectional categories showing purpose and direction and such complex notions as "to go in order to" or "to come in order to", "go, do and return", "do while going", "do while coming", "do upon arrival", or "go around doing".
Classical Nahuatl and many modern dialects have grammaticalised ways to express politeness towards addressees or even towards people or things that are being mentioned, by using special verb forms and special "honorific suffixes".
Familiar verbal form:
- ti-mo-tlaːlo-a
- you-yourself-run-PRESENT
- "you run"(Classical Nahuatl)
Honorific verbal form:
- ti-mo-tlaːlo-tsino-a
- you-yourself-run-HONORIFIC-PRESENT
- "You run"(said with respect) (Classical Nahuatl)
Syntax
Some linguists have argued that Nahuatl displays the properties of a non-configurational languageNon-configurational language
In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages in which there is no verb phrase constituent . In configurational languages, the subject of a sentence is outside the VP and the object is inside; in non-configurational languages, since there is no VP constituent, there is no...
, meaning that word order in Nahuatl is basically free. Nahuatl allows all possible orderings of the three basic sentence constituents. It is prolifically a pro-drop language: it allows sentences with omission of all noun phrases or independent pronouns, not just of noun phrases or pronouns whose function is the sentence subject. In most varieties independent pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s are used only for emphasis. It allows certain kinds of syntactically discontinuous expressions.
Michel Launey argues that Nahuatl has a verb-initial basic word order with extensive freedom for variation, which is then used to encode pragmatic
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
functions such as focus and topicality.
- newal no-nobia
- I my-fianceé
- "My fiancée "(and not anyone else’s) (Michoacán Nahual)
It has been argued that classical Nahuatl syntax is best characterised by "omnipredicativity", meaning that any noun or verb in the language is in fact a full predicative sentence. A radical interpretation of Nahuatl syntactic typology, this nonetheless seems to account for some of the language's peculiarities, for example, why nouns must also carry the same agreement prefixes as verbs, and why predicates do not require any noun phrases to function as their arguments. For example the verbal form tzahtzi means "he/she/it shouts", and with the second person prefix titzahtzi it means "you shout". Nouns are inflected in the same way: the noun "konētl" means not just "child", but also "it is a child", and tikonētl means "you are a child". This prompts the omnipredicative interpretation, which posits that all nouns are also predicates. A phrase such as tzahtzi in konētl should not be interpreted as meaning just "the child screams" but, more correctly, "it screams, (the one that) is a child".
Contact phenomena
Nearly 500 years of intense contact between speakers of Nahuatl and speakers of SpanishSpanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, combined with the minority status of Nahuatl and the higher prestige associated with Spanish has caused many changes in modern Nahuatl varieties, with large numbers of words borrowed from Spanish into Nahuatl, and the introduction of new syntactic constructions and grammatical categories.
For example, a construction like the following, with several borrowed words and particles, is common in many modern varieties (Spanish loanwords in boldface):
- pero āmo tēchentenderoah lo que tlen tictoah en mexicanoThe words pero, entender, lo-que, and en are all from Spanish. The use of the suffix -oa on a Spanish infinitive like entender, enabling the use of other Nahuatl verbal affixes, is standard. The sequence lo que tlen combines Spanish lo que 'what' with Nahuatl tlen (also meaning 'what') to mean (what else) 'what'. en is a preposition and heads a prepositional phrase; traditionally Nahuatl had postpositions or relational nouns rather than prepositions. The stem mexihka, related to the name mexihko, 'Mexico', is of Nahuatl origin, but the suffix -ano is from Spanish, and it is probable that the whole word mexicano is a re-borrowing from Spanish back into Nahuatl.
- but not they-us-understand-PLURAL that which what we-it-say in Nahuatl
- "But they don't understand what we say in Nahuatl" (Malinche Nahuatl)
In some modern dialects basic word order has become a fixed subject–verb–object, probably under influence from Spanish. Other changes in the syntax of modern Nahuatl include the use of Spanish prepositions instead of native postpositions or relational nouns and the reinterpretation of original postpositions/relational nouns into prepositions. In the following example, from Michoacán Nahual, the postposition -ka meaning "with" appears used as a preposition, with no preceding object:
- ti-ya ti-k-wika ka tel
- you-go you-it-carry with you
- "are you going to carry it with you?" (Michoacán Nahual)
And, in this example from Mexicanero
Mexicanero
Mexicanero is the name used by the speakers of the variety of the Nahuatl language spoken in southern Durango to refer to their language. It is a member of the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It has around 1000 speakers in the remote towns of San Pedro Jícora and San Juan...
Nahuat, of Durango
Durango
Durango officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Durango is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. The state is located in Northwest Mexico. With a population of 1,632,934, it has Mexico's second-lowest population density, after Baja...
, the original postposition/relational noun -pin "in/on" is used as a preposition. "porque", a preposition borrowed from Spanish, also occurs in the sentence.
- amo wel kalaki-yá pin kal porke ¢akwa-tiká im pwerta
- not can he-enter-PAST in house because it-closed-was the door
- "He couldn't enter the house because the door was closed" (Mexicanero Nahuat)
Many dialects have also undergone a degree of simplification of their morphology which has caused some scholars to consider them to have ceased to be polysynthetic.
Vocabulary
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
into the Spanish language
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, most of which are terms designating things indigenous to the American continent. Some of these loans are restricted to Mexican or Central American Spanish, but others have entered all the varieties of Spanish in the world. A number of them, such as "chocolate", "tomato" and "avocado" have made their way into many other languages via Spanish.
Likewise a number of English words have been borrowed from Nahuatl through Spanish. Two of the most prominent are undoubtedly chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC...
While there is no real doubt that the word "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the commonly given Nahuatl etymology /ʃokolaːtl/ "bitter water" no longer seems to be tenable. Dakin and Wichmann (2000) suggest the correct etymology to be /tʃikolaːtl/ - a word found in several modern Nahuatl dialects. and tomato
Tomato
The word "tomato" may refer to the plant or the edible, typically red, fruit which it bears. Originating in South America, the tomato was spread around the world following the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and its many varieties are now widely grown, often in greenhouses in cooler...
(from Nahuatl tomatl). Other common words such as coyote
Coyote
The coyote , also known as the American jackal or the prairie wolf, is a species of canine found throughout North and Central America, ranging from Panama in the south, north through Mexico, the United States and Canada...
(from Nahuatl coyotl), avocado
Avocado
The avocado is a tree native to Central Mexico, classified in the flowering plant family Lauraceae along with cinnamon, camphor and bay laurel...
(from Nahuatl ahuacatl) and chile or chili
Chili pepper
Chili pepper is the fruit of plants from the genus Capsicum, members of the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The term in British English and in Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia and other Asian countries is just chilli without pepper.Chili peppers originated in the Americas...
(from Nahuatl chilli). The word chicle
Chicle
Manilkara chicle is a tropical evergreen tree native to Mexico and Central America. The tree ranges from Veracruz in Mexico south to Atlántico in Colombia...
is also derived from Nahuatl tzictli "sticky stuff, chicle". Some other English words from Nahuatl are: Aztec
Aztec
The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.Aztec is the...
, (from aztecatl); cacao (from Nahuatl cacahuatl 'shell, rind'); ocelot
Ocelot
The ocelot , pronounced /ˈɒsəˌlɒt/, also known as the dwarf leopard or McKenney's wildcat is a wild cat distributed over South and Central America and Mexico, but has been reported as far north as Texas and in Trinidad, in the Caribbean...
(from ocelotl). In Mexico many words for common everyday concepts attest to the close contact between Spanish and Nahuatl, so many in fact that entire dictionaries of "mexicanismos" (words particular to Mexican Spanish) have been published tracing Nahuatl etymologies, as well as Spanish words with origins in other indigenous languages. Many well known toponyms also come from Nahuatl, including Mexico (from the Nahuatl word for the Aztec capital mexihco) and Guatemala (from the word cuauhtēmallan).The Mexica used the word for the Kaqchikel capital Iximche
Iximche
Iximche is a Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican archaeological site in the western highlands of Guatemala. Iximche was the capital of the Late Postclassic Kaqchikel Maya kingdom from 1470 until its abandonment in 1524. The architecture of the site included a number of pyramid-temples, palaces and two...
in central Guatemala, but the word was extended to the entire zone in colonial times; see Carmack 1981:143.
Writing
Maya script
The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...
could. Therefore, Aztec writing was not meant to be read, but to be told. The elaborate codices were essentially pictographic aids for memorizing texts, which include genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists. Three kinds of signs were used in the system: pictures used as mnemonic
Mnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...
s (which do not represent particular words), logogram
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s which represent whole words (instead of phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s or syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
s), and logograms used only for their sound values (i.e. used according to the rebus
Rebus
A rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames, for example in its basic form 3 salmon fish to denote the name "Salmon"...
principle).
The Spanish introduced the Roman script, which was used to record a large body of Aztec prose, poetry and mundane documentation such as testaments, administrative documents, legal letters, etc. In a matter of decades pictorial writing was completely replaced with the Latin alphabet. No standardized Latin orthography has been developed for Nahuatl, and no general consensus has arisen for the representation of many sounds in Nahuatl that are lacking in Spanish, such as long vowels and the glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
. The orthography most accurately representing the phonemes of Nahuatl was developed in the 17th century by the Jesuit Horacio Carochi
Horacio Carochi
Horacio Carochi was an Italian Jesuit priest and grammarian who was born in Florence, Italy, and died in Mexico. He is known for his grammar of the Classical Nahuatl language.- Life:...
. Carochi's orthography used two different accents: a macron
Macron
A macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Greco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel...
to represent long vowels and a grave
Grave accent
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
for the saltillo, and sometimes an acute accent for short vowels. This orthography did not achieve a wide following outside of the Jesuit community.
When Nahuatl became the subject of focused linguistic studies in the 20th century, linguists acknowledged the need to represent all the phonemes of the language. Several practical orthographies were developed to transcribe the language, many using the Americanist transcription
Americanist phonetic notation
Americanist phonetic notation is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American anthropologists and language scientists for the phonetic and phonemic transcription of Native American and European languages...
system. With the establishment of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas
Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas
The Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas is a Mexican federal public agency, created 13 March 2003 by the enactment of the Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas by the administration of President Vicente Fox...
in 2004, new attempts to create standardized orthographies for the different dialects were resumed; however to this day there is no single official orthography for Nahuatl. Apart from dialectal differences, major issues in transcribing Nahuatl include:
- whether to follow Spanish orthographic practice and write /k/ with c and qu, /kʷ/ with cu and uc, /s/ with c and z, or s, and /w/ with hu and uh, or u.
- how to write the "saltilloSaltillo (linguistics)In Mexican linguistics, saltillo refers to a glottal stop consonant, . It was given that name by the early grammarians of Classical Nahuatl. In a number of other Nahuatl languages, the sound cognate to Classical Nahuatl’s glottal stop is , and the term saltillo is applied to either pronunciation...
" phoneme (in some dialects pronounced as a glottal stopGlottal stopThe glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
[ʔ] and in others as an [h]), which has been spelled with j, h, ’ (apostrophe), or a grave accent on the preceding vowel, but which traditionally has often been omitted in writing. - whether and how to represent vowel length, e.g. by double vowels or by the use of macrons.
Literature
Among the indigenous languages of the AmericasIndigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
, extensive corpus of surviving literature in Nahuatl dating as far back as the 16th century may be considered unique. Nahuatl literature encompasses a diverse array of genres and styles, the documents themselves composed under many different circumstances. It appears that the preconquest Nahua had a distinction much like the European distinction between "prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
" and "poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
", the first called tlahtolli "speech" and the second cuicatl "song".
Nahuatl tlahtolli prose has been preserved in different forms. Annals and chronicles recount history, normally written from the perspective of a particular altepetl
Altepetl
The altepetl, in Pre-Columbian and Spanish conquest-era Aztec society, was the local, ethnically based political entity. The word is a combination of the Nahuatl words ā-tl, meaning water, and tepē-tl, meaning mountain....
(locally based polity
Polity
Polity is a form of government Aristotle developed in his search for a government that could be most easily incorporated and used by the largest amount of people groups, or states...
) and often combining mythical accounts with real events. Important works in this genre include those from Chalco
Chalco
Aluminum Corporation of China Limited, also known as Chalco , is a multinational aluminum company headquartered in Beijing, People's Republic of China...
written by Chimalpahin, from Tlaxcala
History of Tlaxcala
History of Tlaxcala is an illustrated codex written by and under the supervision of Diego Muñoz Camargo in the years leading up to 1585. Also known as Lienzo Tlaxcala and by its Spanish title, Historia de Tlaxcala, this manuscript highlights the religious, cultural, and military history of the...
by Diego Muñoz Camargo
Diego Muñoz Camargo
Diego Muñoz Camargo was the author of History of Tlaxcala, an illustrated codex that highlights the religious, cultural, and military history of the Tlaxcalan people.-Life:...
, from Mexico-Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc
Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc
Fernando or Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc was a colonial Nahua noble. A son of Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin and Francisca de Moctezuma , Tezozómoc worked as an interpreter for the Real Audiencia...
and those of Texcoco by Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl
Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl
Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl was a Novohispanic historian.-Life:A Castizo born between 1568 and 1580, Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl was a direct descendant of Ixtlilxochitl I and Ixtlilxochitl II, who had been tlatoque of Texcoco...
. Many annals recount history year-by-year and are normally written by anonymous authors. These works are sometimes evidently based on pre-Columbian pictorial year counts that existed, such as the Cuauhtitlan
Cuautitlán
Cuautitlán is a city and municipality in the State of Mexico, just north of the northern tip of the Federal District within the Greater Mexico City urban area. The city has engulfed most of the municipality, making the two synonymous...
annals and the Anales de Tlatelolco
Anales de Tlatelolco
The Anales de Tlatelolco is a codex manuscript written in Nahuatl, using Latin characters, by anonymous Aztec authors in 1528 in Tlatelolco, only seven years after the fall of the Aztec Empire...
. Purely mythological narratives are also found, like the "Legend of the Five Suns
Five Suns
Five Suns is an album by progressive rock group Guapo released in 2003.- Track listing :#Five Suns, Pt. 1 #Five Suns, Pt. 2 #Five Suns, Pt. 3 #Five Suns, Pt. 4 #Five Suns, Pt...
", the Aztec creation myth recounted in Codex Chimalpopoca.
One of the most important works of prose written in Nahuatl is the twelve-volume compilation generally known as the Florentine Codex
Florentine Codex
The Florentine Codex is the common name given to a 16th century ethnographic research project in Mesoamerica by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Bernardino originally titled it: La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana...
, produced in the mid-16th century by the Franciscan
Franciscan
Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
missionary Bernardino de Sahagún
Bernardino de Sahagún
Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain . Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529, and spent more than 50 years conducting interviews regarding Aztec...
with the help of a number of Nahua informants
Informant (linguistics)
An informant or consultant in linguistics is a native speaker who acts as a linguistic reference for a language being studied. The informant's role is that of a senior interpreter, who demonstrates native pronunciation, provides grammaticality judgments regarding linguistic well-formedness, and may...
. With this work Sahagún bestowed an enormous ethnographic description of the Nahua, written in side-by-side translations of Nahuatl and Spanish and illustrated throughout by color plates drawn by indigenous painters. Its volumes cover a diverse range of topics: Aztec history, material culture, social organization, religious and ceremonial life, rhetorical style and metaphors. The twelfth volume provides an indigenous perspective on the conquest itself. Sahagún also made a point of trying to document the richness of the Nahuatl language, stating:
Nahuatl poetry is preserved in principally two sources: the Cantares Mexicanos
Cantares Mexicanos
The Cantares Mexicanos is the name given to a manuscript collection of Nahuatl songs or poems recorded in the 16th century. The 91 songs of the Cantares form the largest Nahuatl song collection, containg over half of all known traditional Nahuatl songs...
and the Romances de los señores de Nueva España
Romances de los señores de Nueva España
The Romances de los señores de Nueva España is a 16th century compilation of Nahuatl songs or poems preserved in the Library of the University of Texas...
, both collections of Aztec songs written down in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some songs may have been preserved through oral tradition from pre-conquest times until the time of their writing, for example the songs attributed to the poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl
Nezahualcoyotl
Nezahualcoyotl was a philosopher, warrior, architect, poet and ruler of the city-state of Texcoco in pre-Columbian Mexico...
. Lockhart and Karttunen identify more than four distinct styles of songs, e.g. the icnocuicatl ("sad song"), the xopancuicatl ("song of spring"), melahuaccuicatl ("plain song") and yaocuicatl ("song of war"), each with distinct stylistic traits. Aztec poetry makes rich use of metaphoric imagery and themes and are lamentation of the brevity of human existence, the celebration of valiant warriors who die in battle, and the appreciation of the beauty of life.
Stylistics
The Aztecs distinguished between at least two social registers of language: the language of commoners (macehuallahtolli) and the language of the nobility (tecpillahtolli). The latter was marked by the use of a distinct rhetorical style. Since literacy was confined mainly to these higher social classes, most of the existing prose and poetical documents were written in this style. An important feature of this high rhetorical style of formal oratory was the use of parallelism, whereby the orator structured their speech in coupletCouplet
A couplet is a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the same meter.While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do. A poem may use white space to mark out couplets if they do not rhyme. Couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter are called heroic...
s consisting of two parallel phrases. For example:
- ye maca timiquican
- "May we not die"
- ye maca tipolihuican
- "May we not perish"
Another kind of parallelism used is referred to by modern linguists as difrasismo
Difrasismo
Difrasismo is a term derived from Spanish that is used in the study of certain Mesoamerican languages, to describe a particular grammatical construction in which two separate words are paired together to form a single metaphoric unit...
, in which two phrases are symbolically combined to give a metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
ical reading. Classical Nahuatl was rich in such diphrasal metaphors, many of which are explicated by Sahagún in the Florentine Codex and by Andrés de Olmos
Andrés de Olmos
Andrés de Olmos , Franciscan priest and extraordinary grammarian and ethno-historian of Mexico's Indians, was born in Oña, Burgos, Spain, and died in Tampico in New Spain...
' in his Arte. Such difrasismos include:
- in xochitl, in cuicatl
- "The flower, the song" – meaning "poetry"
- in cuitlapilli, in atlapalli
- "the tail, the wing" – meaning "the common people"
- in toptli, in petlacalli
- "the chest, the box" meaning "something secret"
- in yollohtli, in eztli
- "the heart, the blood" – meaning "cacao"
- in iztlactli, in tenqualactli
- "the drool, the spittle" – meaning "lies"
Sample text
The sample text below is an excerpt from a statement issued in Nahuatl by Emiliano ZapataEmiliano Zapata
Emiliano Zapata Salazar was a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, and which was initially directed against the president Porfirio Díaz. He formed and commanded an important revolutionary force, the Liberation Army of the South, during the Mexican Revolution...
in 1918 in order to convince the Nahua towns in the area of Tlaxcala to join the Revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
against the regime of Venustiano Carranza
Venustiano Carranza
Venustiano Carranza de la Garza, was one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution. He ultimately became President of Mexico following the overthrow of the dictatorial Huerta regime in the summer of 1914 and during his administration the current constitution of Mexico was drafted...
. The orthography employed in the letter is improvised, and does not distinguish long vowels and only sporadically marks "" (with both
See also
- Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicanaVocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicanaVocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana is a Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary by Pedro de Arenas, first published some time before 1611 . It was one of the most popular Nahuatl dictionaries, going through at least eleven editions in 220 years.-External links:*...
(a Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary) - Vocabulario trilingüeVocabulario trilingüeThe Vocabulario trilingüe is an anonymous 16th century manuscript copy of the second edition of Antonio de Nebrija's Spanish-Latin dictionary, which has been expanded by the addition of Nahuatl translations of its entries in red ink. The manuscript is currently held by the Newberry Library in...
(dictionary of Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl)
Further reading
Dictionaries of Classical Nahuatl- de Molina, Fray Alonso: Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana y Mexicana y Castellana. [1555] Reprint: Porrúa México 1992
- Karttunen, Frances, An analytical dictionary of Náhuatl. Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1992
- Siméon, Rémi: Diccionario de la Lengua Náhuatl o Mexicana. [Paris 1885] Reprint: México 2001
Grammars of Classical Nahuatl
- Carochi, Horacio. Grammar of the Mexican Language: With an Explanation of its Adverbs (1645) Translated by James Lockhart. Stanford University Press. 2001.
- Lockhart, James: Nahuatl as written: lessons in older written Nahuatl, with copious examples and texts, Stanford 2001
- Sullivan, Thelma: Compendium of Nahuatl Grammar, Univ. of Utah Press, 1988.
- Campbell, Joe and Frances Karttunen, Foundation course in Náhuatl grammar. Austin 1989
- Launey, Michel. Introducción a la lengua y a la literatura Náhuatl. México D.F.: UNAM. 1992 (Spanish); An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl [English translation/adaptation by Christopher Mackay], 2011, Cambridge University Press.
- Andrews, J. Richard. Introduction to Classical Nahuatl University of Oklahoma Press: 2003 (revised edition)
Modern Dialects
- Ronald W. Langacker (ed.): Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar 2: Modern Aztec Grammatical Sketches, Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics, 56. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington, pp. 1–140. ISBN 0-88312-072-0. OCLC 6086368. 1979. (Contains studies of Nahuatl from Michoacan, Tetelcingo, Huasteca and North Puebla)
- Canger, Una. Mexicanero de la Sierra Madre Occidental, Archivo de Lenguas Indígenas de México, #24. México D.F.: El Colegio de México. ISBN 968-12-1041-7. OCLC 49212643. 2001 (Spanish)
- Campbell, Lyle. The Pipil Language of El Salvador, Mouton Grammar Library (No. 1). Berlin: Mouton Publishers. 1985. ISBN 0-89925-040-8. OCLC 13433705.
- Wolgemuth, Carl. Gramática Náhuatl de los municipios de Mecayapan y Tatahuicapan de Juárez, Veracruz, 2nd edition. 2002.
Miscellaneous
- The Nahua Newsletter: edited by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Indiana University (Chief Editor Alan Sandstrom)
- Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl: special interest-yearbook of the Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas (IIH) of the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM), Ed.: Miguel Leon Portilla
- A Catalogue of Pre-1840 Nahuatl Works Held by The Lilly Library from The Indiana University Bookman No. 11. November, 1973: 69-88.
External links
- Ethnologue Náhuatl dialects
- Nahuatl (Aztec) family, SIL-Mexico, with subsites on some specific variants
- Nahuatl Swadesh vocabulary list from Wiktionary
- Náhuatl-French dictionary Includes basic grammar
- http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/nahBooks at Project GutenbergProject GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
in Nahuatl] - Brief Notes on Classical Nahuatl Lessons, grammatical sketch and texts
- AULEX Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary
- Freelang English-Nahuatl dictionary