Nahuatl language.html



Nahuatl, Mexicano, Nawatl Nāhuatlahtōlli, Māsēwallahtōlli
Nahua woman from the Florentine Codex. The speech scroll indicates that she is speaking:
Spoken in:	Mexico (Mexico State, Distrito Federal, Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Morelos, Oaxaca, Michoacán and Durango) El Salvador United States,
Total speakers:	1.45 million (2000)1
Language family:	Uto-Aztecan  Aztecan   General Aztec    Nahuatl, Mexicano, Nawatl
Official status
Official language in:	In Mexico through the General Law of Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples (in Spanish).
Regulated by:	Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas [1]
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	None
ISO 639-2:	nah
ISO 639-3:	nci – Classical Nahuatl For modern varieties, see List of Nahuan languages.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Nahuatl ( [ˈnaː.wat͡ɬ] (help·info), stress being 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. All Nahuan languages are indigenous to Mesoamerica and are spoken by an estimated 1.5 million Nahua people, most of whom live in Central Mexico. The word nāhuatl (noun stem nāhua, + absolutive -tl- ) probably has the meaning in Classical Nahuatl of "a good, clear sound"² This language name has several spellings, among them Náhuatl (the standard spelling in Mexico), Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl, and Nahua (the spelling used in Spain, as in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy). Nahuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD.³ At the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early 16th century it was the language of the Aztecs, who dominated 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 dialect 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 chronicles, grammars, works of poetry, administrative documents and codices were written in the 16th and 17th centuries.⁴ This early literary language based on the Tenochtitlan dialect has been labeled Classical Nahuatl and is among the most-studied and best-documented languages of the Americas.⁵

Today Nahuatl dialects⁶ are spoken in scattered communities mostly in rural areas. There are considerable differences between dialects, and some are mutually unintelligible. They have all been subject to varying degrees of influence from Spanish. No modern dialects 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.⁷ Under Mexico's Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ("General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples") promulgated in 2003,⁸ 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.⁹

Nahuatl is a language with a complex morphology characterized by polysynthesis and agglutination, allowing the construction of long words with complex meanings out of several stems and affixes. 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 thereby 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", "chili", "chocolate", "coyote" and "tomato".

Preliminary notes on classification and language group designations

The branch of Uto-Aztecan to which Nahuatl belongs has until recently been called "Aztecan".¹⁰ From the 1990s on, the replacement designation, "Nahuan" has been frequently used. Since the monograph of Campbell and Langacker (1978a), the Nahuan (Aztecan) branch of Uto-Aztecan is widely accepted as having two branches:^11121314 what Campbell and Langacker dubbed General Aztec,¹⁵ which includes Nahuatl and Pipil, and Pochutec (a scantily attested language which went extinct in the 20th century). The notion that Pochutec is not a variety of Nahuatl was already several decades old, but Campbell and Langacker adduced new arguments for it, and there has been little if any rebuttal in the literature.

"Nahuatl" denotes at least Classical Nahuatl together with related modern languages spoken in Mexico. In the past, some researchers have classified the Pipil language of western El Salvador within Nahuatl because Pipil has a fair amount of mutual intelligibility with some of the Mexican dialects (which themselves are not all mutually intelligible). Pipil is uncontroversially regarded as having started out as a dialect of Nahuatl. There are other investigators, such as Campbell, who consider that Pipil has diverged so far from the Mexican dialects of Nahuatl as to merit being considered distinct from "Nahuatl"; hence the creation of the grouping, "General Aztec". The classification of Mexican Nahuatl dialects will be discussed in detail below.

History

Pre-Columbian period

On the issue of geographic origin, the consensus of linguistic researchers during the 20th century was that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in the southwestern United States.¹⁶ Recently, this view 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.¹⁷ 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. Before reaching the central altiplano, these early pre-Nahuan groups probably spent a period of time in contact with the Coracholan languages Cora and Huichol of northwestern Mexico.¹⁸ The purported migration of Proto-Nahuan speakers into the Mesoamerican region has been placed at sometime around AD 500, towards the end of the Early Classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.¹⁹ The major political and cultural center of Mesoamerica in the Early Classic period was Teotihuacan, the great city which flourished in central Mexico during the first half millennium AD. The identity of the language(s) spoken by Teotihuacan's founders has long been debated, with the relationship of Nahuatl to Teotihuacan has figured centrally in that enquiry.²⁰ 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 discount 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.²¹ But recently, evidence from Mayan epigraphy of possible Nahuatl loanwords in Mayan languages has been interpreted as demonstrating that Nahuan influences may have been significantly earlier than previously thought, bolstering the possibility of a significant Nahuatl presence at Teotihuacan.^{222324 2526}

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.²⁷²⁸ Examples of such adopted traits are the use of relational nouns, the appearance of calques, 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.²⁹ Since 1980, researchers have been classifying modern Nahuatl into two genetic subgroupings: Central dialects and Peripheral dialects. The Peripheral dialects are thought to correspond to the earliest migrations of Nahuatls into Mesoamerica: in their evolution they are more conservative than the Central dialects and they also do not display much influence from the Central dialects.³⁰ Some Nahuan groups migrated south along the Central American isthmus, reaching as far as Panama; the obsolescent Pipil language of El Salvador is the only living descendant of the variety of Nahuatl spoken by these migrants.³¹³²

Beginning in the 7th century Nahuan speakers rose to power in central Mexico, where they expanded into areas earlier occupied by speakers of Oto-Manguean languages, Totonacan languages, and the Wastek language of the Mayan family. 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, and the traits associated with the Central dialects spread within central Mexico in the epi-Toltec period migrations. 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. Successive Nahua migrations from the north into the region continued into the Postclassic period. One of the last of these migrations to arrive in the valley settled on an island in the Lake Texcoco and proceeded to subjugate the surrounding tribes. This group were the Mexica (or Mexihka), who over the course of the next three centuries founded an empire based from this island, named Tenochtitlan. Their political and linguistic influence came to reach well into Central America and Nahuatl became a lingua franca among merchants and elites in northern Mesoamerica, e.g., among the K'iche' Maya.³³

Colonial period

With the arrival of the Spanish 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.³⁴ 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.³⁵ 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, Nicaragua 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 "Mexicanos". (The postconquest presence of Nahua peoples well inside modern-day US territory is well documented. For example, a map of Santa Fe, New Mexico drawn ca. 1768 by José de Urrutia shows a pueblo ("village") or barrio named Analco spread along the southern bank of the Santa Fe River, opposite to the Spanish town. This settlement of Analco, labelled "E" on the map, is accompanied by the text: "Pueblo ò Barrio de Analco que debe su origen à los Tracaltecas que acompa[ña]ron à los primeros Eſpañoles que entraron à la Conquiſta de eſte Reino" ("village or quarter of Analco, which owes its origins to the Tlaxcaltecs who accompanied the first Spaniards who entered into the conquest of this region"). ³⁶)

Page 51 of Book IX from the Florentine Codex. The text is in Nahuatl written with a Latin script.

As a part of their missionary efforts, members of various religious orders (principally Fransciscan friars, Dominican friars, and Jesuits) introduced the Latin alphabet to the Nahuas, who were eager to learn to read and write both in Spanish and in their own language. Within the first twenty years after the Spanish arrival, texts were being prepared in the Nahuatl language written in Latin characters.³⁷³⁸ 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 priests. Missionary grammarians undertook the writing of grammars³⁹ 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 in the Spanish language. By 1645 four more had been published, authored respectively by Alonso de Molina (1571), Antonio del Rincón (1595), Diego de Guzmán (1642), and Horacio Carochi (1645). Carochi's is today considered the most important of the colonial era grammars of Nahuatl.⁴⁰

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.⁴¹ 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.⁴² 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.⁴³

Modern period

Map showing the areas of Mesoamerica where Nahuatl is spoken today (in White) and where it is known to have been spoken historically (Grey)⁴⁴

Throughout the modern period the situation of indigenous languages has grown increasingly precarious, 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.⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶

Since the early 20th century and until recently, educational policies in Mexico focused on the "Hispanification" of indigenous communities, teaching only Spanish and discouraging the use of Nahuatl.⁴⁷ As a result, today there is no group of Nahuatl speakers having attained general literacy in Nahuatl,⁴⁸ (incidentally, their literacy rate in Spanish also remains much lower than the national average⁴⁹). 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.⁵⁰⁵¹

Recently government policy has changed diametrically to promoting the use of indigenous languages, especially in writing. The Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas [General Law on the Language Rights of the Indigenous Peoples], promulgated on 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.⁵² At schools for Nahuatl children, at least some of the instruction is in Nahuatl. Although there are still logistical problems, such as lack of textbooks in the Nahuatl of particular regions, or a teacher who speaks one dialect being assigned to teach children who speak a different dialect, there is at least some movement towards greater literacy in Nahuatl and greater public use of written Nahuatl. There is some government sponsored broadcasting in Nahuatl, produced by the CDI. 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.⁵³

Geographic distribution

Main articles: Nahuatl dialects, List of Nahuan languages, and Nahua peoples

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 Nawat⁵⁴), 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."⁵⁵ Another Nahuan language, Pochutec, was spoken on the coast of Oaxaca until circa 1930.⁵⁶

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.⁵⁷ 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 speak at least one other language, most 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 was formerly spoken in the states of Jalisco and Colima, where it became extinct during the 20th century. As a result of internal migrations within the country, all Mexico's states today have some isolated pockets and groups of Nahuatl speakers. The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States has resulted in the establishment of a few small Nahuatl speaking communities, particularly in New York and California.⁵⁸

Subclassification of Nahuatl dialects

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.⁵⁹ Nowadays the term "Aztec" is rarely used for modern Nahuan languages, but "Aztecan" is used for the Nahuatl languages and dialects when described as the second constituent part of the Uto-Aztecan language family. (This group is also often called "Nahuan".) Since 1978, the term "General Aztec" has been adopted by linguists to refer to the languages of the Aztecan branch excluding Pochutec.⁶⁰

The speakers of Nahuatl themselves often refer to their language as either Mexicano⁶¹ 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.⁶² The Pipil of El Salvador do not call their own language "Pipil", as most linguists do, but rather nawat.⁶³ The Nahuas of Durango call their language Mexicanero.⁶⁴ Speakers of Nahuatl of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec call their language mela'tajtol ("the straight language").⁶⁵ 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.⁶⁶

The place of Nahuatl within Uto-Aztecan

Main articles: Uto-Aztecan languages and Nahuatl dialects

The Nahuatl languages belong to the Uto-Aztecan language family which is one of the largest and best studied language families of the Americas. The languages within Uto-Aztecan are classified into eight genetic branches, among them "Nahuan" or "Aztecan". Proto-Nahuan split into two groups, called Pochutec and General Aztec. The modern Pochutec language died some time during the 20th century. Nahuatl and Pipil in General Aztec are the only living languages of the Nahuan (Aztecan) branch.

Nahuatl dialects

The classification scheme of Hasler in the mid 20th century rested on the interdialectal sound correspondence of /tl ~ t ~ l/.⁶⁷ This scheme was disproved by Campbell and Langacker (1978).

Currently the most authoritative classification schemes for the Nahuatl dialects arise from Lastra de Suarez (1986) and Canger (1980), both of whom conducted research aimed at delineating isoglosses (linguistic boundaries based on differences in phonology, grammar and vocabulary). Under these schemes, which differ only in one respect, there is a basic split between Central and Peripheral dialects. It is hypothesized that the speakers of Peripheral dialects were the first Nahuatl speakers to arrive in Mesoamerica, and that they therefore preserve some slightly archaic features. The speakers of the later arriving Central dialects (more properly, speakers of the ancestor dialects to modern day Central dialects), among them the Aztecs, introduced linguistic innovations that then spread outwards from the Valley of Mexico aided by the expansion of Aztec hegemony and prestige. The two schemes differ primarily in their classification of the dialects of Wastek (which are spoken in the region called La Huasteca). Canger includes Wastek dialects 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.)

^*Estimated split date by glottochronology (BP = years Before Present).

^**Some scholars continue to classify Aztecan and Sonoran together under a separate group (called variously "Sonoran", "Mexican", or "Southern Uto-Aztecan"). There is increasing evidence that whatever degree of additional resemblance there might be between Aztecan and Sonoran when compared with Shoshonean is probably due to proximity contact, rather than genetic relationship.^{citation needed}

Phonology

Nahuan is defined as a subgroup of Uto-Aztecan by having undergone a number of shared changes from the Uto-Aztecan protolanguage (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.⁶⁸ Many dialects no longer distinguish between short and long vowels. Some have introduced completely new vowel qualities to compensate for this, as is the case for Tetelcingo Nahuatl.⁶⁹ Others have developed a pitch accent, such as Nahuatl of Oapan, Guerrero.⁷⁰ Many modern dialects have also borrowed phonemes from Spanish, such as /b, d, ɡ, f/.

Sounds

* The glottal phoneme (called the "saltillo") 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 dialect⁷¹ (compare "pervert" and "pervert" in english).

Allophony

Allophony, 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/,⁷² /w/ devoices to a voiceless glottal fricative [h] or to a voiceless labialized velar approximant [ʍ] and /l/ devoices to voiceless alveolar lateral 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 lateral affricate [t͡ɬ] is assimilated after /l/ and pronounced as [l].⁷³

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 morphemes 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).⁷⁴

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.⁷⁵

Reduplication

Many varieties of Nahuatl have productive 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. /tla:katl/ "man" > /tla:tla:kah/ "men", but also in some varieties to form diminutives, honorifics, or for derivations.⁷⁶ 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 /ki:itta/ "he stares at it".

Grammar

See also: Classical Nahuatl grammar

The Nahuatl languages are agglutinative, polysynthetic languages that make extensive use of compounding, incorporation and derivation. That is, they can add many different prefixes and suffixes 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:

ni-mit͡s-te:-t͡la-maki:-lti:-s

I-you-someone-something-give-CAUSATIVE-FUTURE

"I shall make somebody give something to you"⁷⁷ (Classical Nahuatl)

Nouns

The Nahuatl noun is relatively complex with some inflectional categories. It is only obligatorily inflected for number and possession. Noun compounds are commonly formed by combining two or more nominal stem, or combining a noun stem with other kinds of stems such as adjectives or verbs. Nahuatl has neither case nor gender, but Classical Nahuatl and some modern dialects distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns which behave differently with respect to pluralization.

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.

Nahuatl distinguishes only singular and plural forms of nouns. Plural forms of nouns are normally formed by adding a suffix, although some words form irregular plurals by using reduplication. In Classical Nahuatl only animate nouns could take a plural form, whereas all inanimate nouns were uncountable (like the words "bread" and "money" are uncountable in English). Nowadays many dialects do not maintain this distinction and allow all nouns to be pluralized, although most inanimates and sometimes animates often show the common number pattern, i.e. their absolutive form can be understood as either singular or plural.

Nahuatl distinguishes between possessed and unpossessed forms of nouns. As mentioned above, 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.

Nahuatl does not have grammatical case but uses what is sometimes called a relational noun to describe spatial (and other) relations. These morphemes cannot appear alone but must always occur after a noun or a possessive prefix. They are also often called postpositions⁷⁸ or locative suffixes.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰

Pronouns

Nahuatl generally distinguishes three persons – both in the singular and plural numbers. In at least one modern dialect, the Isthmus-Mecayapan 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:⁸¹

Much more common is an honorific/non-honorific distinction, usually applied to second and third persons but not first.

Verbs

The Nahuatl verb is quite complex and inflects many grammatical categories. The verb is composed of a root which can take both prefixes and suffixes. The person of the subject, and person and number of the object and indirect object is expressed by agreement prefixes, whereas tense, aspect, mood and subject number is expressed by suffixes.

Most Nahuatl dialects distinguish present, past and future tenses and perfective and imperfective aspects. Some varieties have progressive or habitual aspects. As for moods all dialects distinguish indicative and imperative moods and 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.⁸³ 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-t͡la-kwa-lti:-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".⁸⁴

Syntax

The syntax of modern and Classical Nahuatl has been a topic of numerous studies. Some linguists, notably Mark Baker, have argued that Nahuatl displays the properties of a non-configurational language, meaning that word order in Nahuatl is basically free.⁸⁵ He notes that Nahuatl allows all possible inversions of the basic sentence constituents, allows pro-drop of all direct arguments of a predicate, and that certain kinds of syntactically discontinuous expressions are allowed.

The widest accepted conclusion is that Nahuatl originally has a basic verb initial word order but with extensive freedom for variation which is then used to encode pragmatic functions such as focus and topicality.⁸⁶ For example in most varieties independent pronouns are used only for emphasis.

newal no-nobia

I my-fianceé

"My fiancée "(and not anyone else’s) (Michoacán Nahual)⁸⁷

It has been argued that classical Nahuatl syntax is best characterised by what Launey calls "omnipredicativity", meaning that any noun or verb in the language is in fact a full predicative sentence.⁸⁸⁸⁹ A radical interpretation of Nahuatl syntactic typology, this nonetheless seems to account for some of its 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 Spanish, 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 mexicano

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)⁹⁰⁹¹

In some modern dialects basic word order has become a fixed Subject Verb Object, probably under influence from Spanish.⁹² Other changes in the syntax of modern Nahuatl includes the usage of Spanish prepositions instead of 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)⁹³

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.

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)⁹⁴

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.⁹⁵

Vocabulary

Main article: Words of Nahuatl origin

The tomato is native to Mexico and the Aztecs called the red variety "xitōmatl" whereas the green Currant tomato was called "tōmatl" – the source for the English word "tomato".

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 chocolate⁹⁶ 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');⁹⁷ ocelot (from ocelotl).⁹⁸ 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).⁹⁹

Writing and literature

Writing

Main article: Nahuatl orthography

See also: Aztec writing and Aztec Codices

The placenames Mapachtepec ("Raccoon Hill"), Mazatlan ("Deer Place") and Huitztlan ("Thorn Place") written in the Aztec writing system. From the Codex Mendoza.

Precolumbian Aztec writing used three basic means of expression: direct representation, or pictures of what was expressed; ideograms or logograms symbolically representing a thing or concept; and, to some degree, phonetic transcription, employing logograms meant to represent only the sound of a given word, to be interpreted according to the rebus principle. This writing system was adequate for keeping such records as genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists, but could not represent a full vocabulary of spoken language in the way that the writing systems of the old world or that of the Maya civilization could. Aztec writing was not meant to be read, but to be told; the elaborate codices were essentially pictographic aids for teaching, and long texts were memorized.¹⁰⁰

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.¹⁰¹ 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.¹⁰² 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.¹⁰³ 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.¹⁰⁴ 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, /s/ with c/z or s, and /w/ with hu or u.
• how to write the "saltillo" phoneme (in some dialects pronounced as a glottal stop [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

Main article: Mesoamerican literature

Among the indigenous languages of the Americas, extensive corpus of surviving literature in Nahuatl dating as far back as the 16th century may be considered unique.¹⁰⁵ 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".¹⁰⁶

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.¹⁰⁸ 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.¹⁰⁹

Stylistics

The Aztecs distinguished between the 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,¹¹⁰ whereby the orator structured their speech in couplets consisting of two parallel phrases. For example:

ye maca timiquican

"May we not die"

ye maca tipolihuican

"May we not perish"¹¹¹

Another kind of parallelism used is referred to by modern linguists as difrasismo, in which two phrases are symbolically combined to give a metaphorical 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 include¹¹²:

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 Zapata in 1918 in order to convince the Nahua towns in the area of Tlaxcala to join the Revolution against the regime of Venustiano Carranza.¹¹³ The orthography employed in the letter is improvised, and does not distinguish long vowels and only sporadically marks "saltillo" (with both <h> and accute accent).

See also

• List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin
• Mexican Spanish

Notes