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Nahuatl was the language spoken in the Aztec Empire, also known as “Mexica.” Although the spoken and written form of the language has changed since pre-Hispanic times, Nahuatl has remained a living language for more than 500 years. Currently, it is still spoken by about a million and a half people in Mexico.
What does Nahuatl mean?
It is believed that the Nahuatl term with which we name the language today derives from nāhuatlahtōlli . This word is formed by Nāhuatl , which means “clear sound” or “pleasant sound” and the word tlahtōlli , which means “language” or “word”. The Nahuatl language or communities are also known as “Nahua”.
Origin of Nahuatl
Nahuatl is part of the Yuto-Nahua or Uto-Aztec family. This is one of the largest within the Native American languages. The Uto-Aztec or Yuto-Nahuan family includes some sixty North American languages. Some of them are the Comanche, the Shoshoni, the Paiute, the Tarahumara, the Cora, and the Huichol.
The Nahuatl language likely originated in the northern and southern regions of Sonora, Mexico, in pre-Hispanic times. In the 16th century AD, Nahuatl was already the most widely spoken language in all of Mesoamerica.
Geographical distribution
With the development of the Aztec Empire and the founding of its capital at Tenochtitlán in the 15th and 16th centuries, Nahuatl spread throughout Mesoamerica. Its geographic distribution included what is now northern Mexico to Costa Rica, and also other parts of southern Central America.
In 1570, King Felipe II established legal measures that reinforced the status of Nahuatl as a popular language. It was used in religious conversion and also as a language for the training of ecclesiastics who worked with natives. Spanish nobles also used Nahuatl to communicate.
Characteristics of the Nahuatl language
Today the language presents both linguistic and cultural variations. There are three main dialects of the group known as Nahua. The Aztecs ruled from the Valley of Mexico and called their language Nahuatl. West of the Valley of Mexico, the dialect was called Nahual. The third group, located in southern Mexico and later in other parts of Central America, used the Nahuat dialect.
Sources of knowledge of the Nahuatl language
Knowledge of Nahuatl today is mainly due to the contribution of two ancient codices. These are documents that contain valuable information that describes the language, its characteristics, and the Aztec culture. These are:
- The Florentine Codex : within this codex is the book Historia General de la Nueva España , written by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1500-1590), in the mid-16th century. It is the most extensive source in the Nahuatl language and consists of twelve volumes. It is an encyclopedia-like compilation of the language and culture of the Aztecs. This text also contains parts written in Spanish and transliterations of Nahuatl into the Latin alphabet.
- The Mendoza Codex : King Carlos I of Spain (1500-1558) commissioned this document to be produced. It was written in the mid-16th century by skilled native scribes and supervised by Spanish clergy. The codex included glosses in both Nahuatl and Spanish. In addition, it included the history of the Aztec conquests, information on the tributes paid to the Aztecs by geographic province, and accounts of Aztec daily life.
The writing of Nahuatl
Classical Nahuatl used around 15 consonants and four vowels, which could be long or short. His grammar included the use of suffixes and prefixes, compound words, and the repetition of syllables.
The writing was pictographic, ideographic and phonetic:
- In the pictographic phase the drawing was used as an expression; for example, if you wanted to indicate a plant, you would draw it.
- In the ideographic phase, a sign was used to indicate a concept that was difficult to draw. For example, if you wanted to represent speech, you would draw a line coming out of the individual’s mouth.
- In phonetic writing, an object was represented to indicate a sound. For example, the symbol for water indicated the “a” sound and a pea indicated the “e” sound.
Examples of words of Nahuatl origin
In Spanish we use several words that come from the Nahuatl language, such as chocolate, chile, avocado, peanut, cacao, coyote, mole, tamale, vulture, and tomato. Many of the Mexican and Central American place names are also the result of a Spanish transliteration of their Nahuatl names. This is the case of Mexico and Guatemala.
The sounds of Nahuatl
Linguists are able to study and define the original sounds of Classical Nahuatl in part because, as mentioned above, the Aztecs used a glyphic writing system that included phonetic elements. Later, Spanish churchmen associated the phonetic alphabet of Latin with the sounds they heard from the locals.
The oldest extant Nahuatl-Latin alphabets are from the Cuernavaca region of Mexico and date from the late 1530s or early 1540s. These alphabets were probably written by indigenous people and compiled by Franciscan friars.
Archaeologist and linguist Frances Berdan provided a small sample guide to Classical Nahuatl pronunciation in her book Aztec Archeology and Ethnohistory (2014). In it she indicates, among other things, that:
- In Classical Nahuatl the main accent or stress in a word almost always occurs on the penultimate syllable.
- There are four main vowels in the language: “A” as in the word “palm”, “E” as in “bet”, “I” as in “si”, and “O” as in “soy”.
- The “tl” sound is not pronounced exactly like “taehl”, but more like a glottal “t” and a small puff of air for the “l”.
- Most of the consonants in Nahuatl are similar to those in Spanish or English.
Nahuatl words as codes
Another fundamental characteristic of Nahuatl is its coded meaning. The priest and cartographer José Antonio Alzate (1737-1799) argued that the Nahuatl names could be useful for the botanical classification of the New World, mainly because they encoded a greater knowledge of each specimen, unlike the Greek denomination that was used at that time. .
Nahuatl today
Nahuatl is still spoken in different parts of Mexico City, such as Xochimilco, Tláhuac and Milpa Alta. It is also spoken in other states of Mexico. Some of them are Nayarit, Aguascalientes, Querétaro, Colima, San Luis Potosí, Jalisco and Puebla. Also in Tlaxcala, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero and in some parts of Tabasco and Yucatán.
According to statistics from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) of Mexico, currently, one in every hundred people in the capital of Mexico speaks Nahuatl.
The Nahuatl language in danger of extinction
After the Mexican War of Independence (1821), Nahuatl was no longer used as an official means of communication and documentation. Mexico’s intellectual elite focused on creating a new national identity. The new vision perceived the indigenous past as an obstacle to the modernization and progress of Mexican society.
Over time, Nahua communities became increasingly isolated from the rest of Mexican society. They suffered what researchers call a political dislocation, stemming from a lack of prestige and power. And also a cultural dislocation, as a result of modernization and globalization.
In 2014, the results of research by ethnologists Justyna Olko and John Sullivan shed new light on Nahuatl. Prolonged contact with Spanish was found to cause important changes in the morphology and syntax of Nahuatl words. Since past and present forms of Nahuatl still coexist in many places, their preservation is essential.
According to statistics, the Nahuatl of Milpa Alta is one of the 364 languages in danger of extinction today. This city only has a little more than 6,000 inhabitants.
To avoid its disappearance and to be able to preserve and disseminate the Nahuatl language, different projects are being carried out. One of them is in charge of the Institute of Ethnological Teaching and Research of Zacatecas (IDIEZ) of Mexico. In it, Nahuatl speakers are encouraged and motivated to continue practicing and developing their language and culture. They are also trained so that they can teach this language to others. They are also invited to actively participate in research projects with academics from around the world.
Bibliography
- Berdan, Frances F. Aztec Archeology and Ethnohistory . (2014) New York. Cambridge University Press.
- Garcia-Mencia, R.; Lopez-Lopez, A.; Muñoz Meléndez, A. A Spanish-Nahuatl audio-lexicon: using technology to promote and disseminate a native Mexican language . (2016). eds. Bradley, L. and S. Thouësny. research-publishing.net.
- Espinoza, M. Learn to Speak Nahuatl – Learn the Language of the Gods: For Beginners (2020). Independent edition.
