Nahuatl language
Nahuatl ) and its variant spellings is a term applied to some members of the Aztecan or Nahuan sub-branch of the
Uto-Aztecan language family, indigenous to central
Mexico. Under the "Law of Linguistic Rights" it is recognized as a "national language" along with 62 other indigenous languages and
Spanish which have the same "validity" in Mexico [
1]. Nahuatl is most famous for its use by the
Aztecs, a variant now known as
Classical Nahuatl.
Nahuatl is the most widely-spoken group of
Native American languages in Mexico or in North America as a whole. As is the case with most other Mexican indigenous languages, many of the speakers of Nahuatl are bilingual, having working knowledge of the
Spanish language. In the past, a significant number of the Nahuatl speakers outside the Valley of Mexico were bilingual in languages other than Spanish, speaking both Nahuatl and, as their mother tongue, some other indigenous language. A famous example of bilingualism was
Malintzin ("La Malinche"), the native woman who translated between Nahuatl and a
Mayan language (and who later learned Spanish as well) for
Hernán Cortés.
There are an estimated 1.5 million people who speak one or another
Nahuatl dialect, some of these dialects being mutually unintelligible. All of these dialects show influence from the Spanish language to various degrees, some of them much more than others. No modern dialects are identical with Classical Nahuatl, but those spoken in and around the
Valley of Mexico are generally more-closely related to it than are peripheral ones.
Often the term
Nahuatl is used specifically with reference to
Classical Nahuatl, the administrative language of the
Aztec empire. The Aztecs were preceded by, and surrounded by, other Nahuatl-speaking cultures, whose language certainly differed in some degree from theirs. These include the
Tepaneca,
Acolhua,
Tlaxcalteca, and Xochimilca; and Nahuatl was perhaps one of the languages spoken in Teotihuacan. As these groups became predominant, Nahuatl, and especially Classical Nahuatl after the ascendancy of the Aztec empire, was used as a
lingua franca in much of
Mesoamerica beginning from the
12th century AD until the
16th century, at which time its prominence and influence were eclipsed by the
Spanish conquest of Mexico. Since we only have documentation available from that point on, and since the Spanish dealt especially with the Mexica in their administrative, religious and scholarly activities, Classical Nahuatl is for us the most available, as well as the most prestigious, early form of the language.
Sometimes a distinction is made among
Nahuan languages between
Nahuatl (variants with the characteristic
tl phoneme),
Nahuat (variants which have
t in its place), and
Nahual (variants which have
l instead). Although the classification implied by emphasizing these differences is currently not given as much weight as in the past, the terms are still used. Sometimes
Nahuan is used for the family as a whole; others use the term
Aztecan for the family, or
Nahua for the family and in any context where one does not want to specify the
tl/t/l differences. Most commonly, however,
Nahuatl is used as a generic name for the family or any variant of it.
Nahuatl is related to the languages spoken by the
Hopi,
Comanche,
Paiute or
Ute,
Pima,
Shoshone,
Tarahumara,
Yaqui,
Tepehuán,
Huichol and other peoples of western North America, as they all belong to the
Uto-Aztecan linguistic stock or
language family consisting of 61 individual languages. This is a grouping on the same order as
Indo-European, including a number of language families such as the Aztecan or Nahuatl family.
Genealogy
*Uto-Aztecan
5000 BP***Shoshonean (Northern Uto-Aztecan)
**Sonoran
****Aztecan
2000 BP (a.k.a. Nahuan)
***Pochutec â€"
Coast of Oaxaca*** General Aztec (Nahuatl)
****Western periphery
****Eastern Periphery
****Huasteca
****Center
See the
Nahuatl dialects page for further discussion of the sub-categories of General Aztec, which are somewhat controversial.
:*Estimated split date by glottochronology (BP = Before the 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 to a common immediate parent stock other than Uto-Aztecan. |
Distribution of Nahuatl speakers per state. |
A range of
Nahuatl dialects are currently spoken in an area stretching from the northern Mexican state of Durango to Tabasco in the south.
Pipil, a Nahuatl dialect which happens to have its own name, is spoken as far south as El Salvador, by less than twenty speakers if it isn't already extinct. Another Nahuan language, Pochutec, was spoken on the coast of
Oaxaca until
circa 1930. The largest concentrations of Nahuatl speakers are found in the states of
Puebla,
Veracruz,
Guerrero and
Hidalgo. Significant populations are also found in
Mexico State,
Morelos, and the
Mexican Federal District. Smaller populations exist in
Michoacan,
Jalisco,
Tabasco, and
Durango.
It is likely that the speakers of Nahuatl languages originally came from the northern Mexican deserts and migrated into central Mexico in several waves. One of the last of these waves settled in what is now the
Valley of Mexico and later founded what came to be known as the
Aztec empire. During this period, if not before, Nahuatl became a
lingua franca, used for trade purposes and as a prestige language in large parts of Mesoamerica, and causing the language to spread even further. For example, at the time of the Spanish conquest, the
Quiché (Mayan) nobility spoke Nahuatl as well as the
Quiché language.
Currently the influx of Mexican workers into the United States has created small Nahuatl-speaking communties in the United States, particularly in New York and California.
Historical Phonological Changes
The Nahuan subgroup of Uto-Aztecan is classified partly by a number of shared phonological changes from reconstructed proto Uto-Aztecan to the attested Nahuan languages. The changes shared between the Nahuan languages are the basis for the reconstruction of the intermediate stage of proto Nahuan. Some of these changes shared by all Nahuan languages are:
*Proto Uto-aztecan **t becomes Proto Nahuan lateral affricate *tl before proto Uto-aztecan **a
*Proto Uto-aztecan initial **p is lost in Proto Nahuan.
*Proto Uto-aztecan **u merges with **i into Proto Nahuan *i
*Proto Uto-aztecan sibilants **ts and **s splits into *ts, *ch and *s, * respectively.
*Proto Uto-aztecan fifth vowel reconstructed as ** or ** merged with **e into proto Nahuan *e
*a large number of metatheses in which Proto Uto-aztecan roots of the shape **CVCV have become *VCCV.
The table below presents some of the changes that are reconstructed from Proto Uto-aztecan to Proto Nahuan.
Table of reconstructed changes from proto Uto-aztecan to proto Nahuan
| PUA | proto Nahuan | | **ta:ka "man" | *tla:ka-tla "man" |
| **pahi "water" | *a:-tla "water" |
| **muki "to die" | *miki "to die |
| **pu:li "to tie" | *ilpi "to tie" |
| **nmi "to walk" | *nemi "to live, to walk" |
From the changes common to all Nahuan languages the subgroup has diversified somewhat and giving a complete overview of the phonologies of Nahuan languages is not suitable here. However, the table below shows a standardised phonemic inventory based on the inventory of Classical Nahuatl. Many modern dialects have undergone changes from proto Nahuan that have resulted in different phonemic inventories.
Consonants
Table of Nahuatl consonants
Vowels
Table of Nahuatl vowels
| | front | central | back | | | long | short | long | short | long | short |
| high | | | | | | |
| rowspan="1" | mid | | | | | |
| low | | | | | |
|
For a grammatical sketch of a nahuan language see the article: 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. Very long verbal forms or nouns created through incorporation and accumulation of prefixes are not uncommon in literary works. This also means that new words can be created at a moment's notice.
A minority of linguists consider the
typology of Nahuatl to be
oligosynthetic. This was first proposed by
Benjamin Whorf in the early
20th Century. However, by the mid-
1950s, this view was largely dismissed by the linguistic community.
See the list of Nahuatl words and list of words of Náhuatl origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project.Words loaned to other languages
Main article: words of Nahuatl origin
Nahuatl has been an exceedingly rich source of words for the
Spanish language, as the following examples show. Some of them are restricted to Mexico or Mesoamerica, but others are common to all the Spanish-speaking regions in the world and a number of them have made their way into many other languages via Spanish.
achiote, acocil, aguacate, ajolote, amate, atole, axolotl, ayate, cacahuate, camote, capulÃn, chamagoso, chapopote, chayote, chicle, chile, chipotle, chocolate, cuate, comal, copal, coyote, ejote, elote, epazote, escuincle, guacamole, guachinango, guajolote, huipil, huitlacoche, hule, jacal, jÃcama, jÃcara, jitomate, malacate, mecate, metate, metlapil, mezcal, mezquite, milpa, mitote, molcajete, mole, nopal, ocelote, ocote, olote, paliacate, papalote, pepenar, petaca, petate, peyote, pinole, piocha, popote, pozole, pulque, quetzal, tamal, tianguis, tiza, tomate, tule, zacate, zapote, zopilote.(The persistent
-te or
-le endings on these words are Spanish reflexes of the Nahuatl 'absolutive' ending
-tl,
-tli, or
-li, which appears on (most) nouns when they have no other
affixes.)
Nahuatl has provided the
English language with some words for indigenous animals, fruits, vegetables, and tools. Most of these borrowings are second-hand, coming first through Spanish. The two most prominent are undoubtedly
chocolate (from
xoco(l)atl, 'chocolate drink', perhaps literally 'bitter-water') and
tomato (from
(xi)tomatl), but there are others, such as
coyote (
coyotl),
avocado (
ahuacatl) and
chile or chili (
chilli). The brand name
Chiclets is also derived from Nahuatl (
tziktli 'sticky stuff, chicle'). Other English words from Náhuatl are:
Aztec, (
aztecatl);
cacao (
cacahuatl 'shell, rind');
mesquite (
mizquitl);
ocelot (
ocelotl).
As a result of extensive Mexican-Philippine contacts, there are an estimated 250 words of Nahuatl origin in the
Tagalog language. Some of them are:
kamote 'sweet potato',
sayote 'chayote',
tiyangge 'seasonal market',
tatay (from
tata, familiar vocative of
tahtli 'father'),
nanay (from
nana, familiar vocative of
nantli 'mother'),
guava 'guava, guayaba',
tsokolate 'chocolate',
tsanggo 'monkey', and the village of Zapote in
Las Piñas City, Philippines.
Many well-known toponyms also come from Nahuatl, including
Mexico (
mÄ"xihco) and
Guatemala (
cuauhtÄ"mallan).
At the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec writing used mostly
pictographs supplemented by a few
ideograms. When needed, it also used syllabic equivalences; Father
Durán recorded how the
tlacuilos (codex painters) could render a prayer in Latin using this system, but it was difficult to use. 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 of the
Maya civilization could. The 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.
The Spanish introduced the Roman script, which was then utilized to record a large body of Aztec prose and poetry, a fact which somewhat mitigated the devastating loss of the thousands of Aztec manuscripts which were burned by the Spanish. (See
Nahuatl transcription and
Aztec codices.) Important lexical works (e.g.
Molina's classic
Vocabulario of 1571) and grammatical descriptions (of which
Carochi's 1645
Arte is generally acknowledged the best) were produced using variations of this
orthography.
The classical orthography was not perfect, and in fact there were many variations in how it was applied, due in part to dialectal differences and in part to differing traditions and preferences that developed. (The writing of Spanish itself was far from totally standardized at the time.) Today, although almost all written Nahuatl uses some form of Latin-based orthography, there continue to be strong dialectal differences, and considerable debate and differing practices regarding how to write sounds even when they are the same. Major issues are
*whether to follow Spanish in writing the sound sometimes as
c and sometimes as
qu or just to use
k*how to write
*what to do about , the realization of which varies considerably from place to place and even within a single dialect
*how to write the "saltillo", phonetically a
glottal stop () or an , which has been spelled with
j,
h, and a straight apostrophe ('), but which traditionally was often omitted in writing. There are a number of other issues as well, such as
*whether and how to represent vowel length
*how and whether to represent sound variants (allophones) which sound like different Spanish sounds [phonemes], especially variants of
o which come close to
u*to what extent writing in one variant should be adapted towards what is used in other variants.
The
SecretarÃa de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education) has adopted an alphabet for its bilingual education programs in rural communities in
Mexico in which
k is used and is written as
u, and this decision has been influential. The recently established (2004) "
Instituto Nacional de Lenguas IndÃgenas" (
INALI) will also be involved in these issues.
Nahuatl is often referred to as the Aztec language, or (especially in Spanish) as the Mexican language, because it was the language of the Mexica, i.e. the Aztecs. It was not spoken only by the Mexica, however, but by many other groups, including such predecessors and contemporaries of the Mexica as the Colhua, the
Tepanec, the
Acolhua, various
Chichimeca groups, and the famous
Toltecs in one interpretation of the term. Increasingly, suggestions have been appearing, from several diverse fields of Mesoamerican research, that Nahuatl may have been one of the languages spoken at the legendary
Teotihuacan.
Literature
Nahuatl literature is extensive (probably the most extensive of all
Amerindian languages), including a relatively large corpus of
poetry (see also
Nezahualcoyotl); the
Huei tlamahuiçoltica is an example of literary Nahuatl from the seventeenth century. Examples from the time immediately following the conquest include at least one census from the 1540s. The two largest collections of poetry, the
Cantares mexicanos and the
Romances de los señores de la Nueva España, were in all likelihood copied down in the 1560s or somewhat later. The mammoth encyclopedia of Aztec culture known as the
Florentine Codex was compiled by the Franciscan Fr.
Bernardino de Sahagun, with the assistance of tri-lingual students from the Colegio de Santacruz Tlatelolco at about the same time.
*de Arenas, Pedro:
Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana. [1611] Reprint: México 1982
*Campbell, Joe and Frances Karttunen,
Foundation course in Náhuatl grammar. Austin 1989
*Carochi, Horacio:
Arte de la lengua mexicana: con la declaración de los adverbios della. [1645] Reprint: Porrúa México 1983
*Canger, Una, 1980. "Five Studies inspired by Náhuatl Verbs in -oa." Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague
*Dakin, Karen, 1982. "Evolución Fonológica del Protonáhuatl." UNAM, Mexico
*Garibay K., Angel MarÃa :
Llave de Náhuatl. Ed. Porrúa, SC706, México 2004.
*Garibay K., Angel MarÃa,
Historia de la literatura náhuatl. México 1953
*Garibay K., Angel MarÃa,
PoesÃa náhuatl. vol 1-3 México 1964
*Garibay K. Angel MarÃa,
Panorama Literario de los Pueblos Nahuas., Ed. Porrúa, SC022, México, 2001.
*Hill, Jane and Kenneth Hill,
Speaking Mexicano: dynamics of syncretic language in Central Mexico. Tucson 1986
*Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=91274
*von Humboldt, Wilhelm (1767â€"1835):
Mexicanische Grammatik. Paderborn/München 1994
*Jiménez, Doña Luz (?â€"1965):
Life and Death in Milpa Alta. Norman 1972
*Karttunen, Frances,
An analytical dictionary of Náhuatl. Norman 1992
*Karttunen, Frances,
Between worlds: interpreters, guides, and survivors. New Brunswick 1994
*Karttunen, Frances,
Náhuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period. Los Angeles 1976
*Launey, Michel :
Introduction à la langue et à la littérature aztèques. Paris 1980
*Launey, Michel :
Introducción a la lengua y a la literatura Náhuatl. UNAM, México 1992
*de León-Portilla, Ascensión H.:
Tepuztlahcuilolli, Impresos en Náhuatl: Historia y Bibliografia. Vol. 1-2. México 1988
*León-Portilla, Miguel :
Literaturas IndÃgenas de México. Madrid 1992
*Lockhart, James (ed):
We people here. Náhuatl Accounts of the conquest of Mexico. Los Angeles 1993
*de Molina, Fray Alonso:
Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana y Mexicana y Castellana. [1555] Reprint: Porrúa México 1992
*de Olmos, Fray Andrés:
Arte de la lengua mexicana concluÃdo en el convento de San Andrés de Ueytlalpan, en la provincia de Totonacapan que es en la Nueva España. [1547] Reprint: México 1993
*del Rincón, Antonio:
Arte mexicana compuesta por el padre Antonio del Rincón. [1595] Reprint: México 1885
*de Sahagún, Fray Bernardino (1499â€"1590):
Florentine Codex. General History of the Things of New Spain (Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España). Eds Charles Dibble/Arthr Anderson, vol I-XII Santa Fe 1950â€"71
*Siméon, Rémi:
Dictionnaire de la Langue Náhuatl ou Mexicaine. [Paris 1885] Reprint: Graz 1963
*Siméon, Rémi:
Diccionario de la Lengua Náhuatl o Mexicana. [Paris 1885] Reprint: México 2001
*Stiles, Neville
Náhuatl in the Huasteca Hidalguense: A Case Study in the Sociology of Language PhD thesis, Centre for Latin American Linguistic Study, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. 1983
*Sullivan, Thelma D & Neville Stiles.:
Compendium of Náhuatl Grammar. Salt Lake City 1988
*The Nahua Newsletter: edited by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the University of Indiana (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
*
:Category: Nahuatl words*
List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin*
Ethnologue reports on Náhuatl*
Náhuatl Learning Resource List, by Ricardo J. Salvador*
Brief Notes on Classical Náhuatl, by David K. Jordan*
Nahuatl (Aztec) family, SIL-Mexico, with subsites on some specific variants*
Náhuatl Summer Language Institute, Yale University*
English â†' Náhuatl,
Nahuatl â†' English (Florentine Codex Vocabulary 1997, by R. Joe Campbell)
*
Náhuatl â†' English (Basic Dictionary, by Acoyauh)
*
Spanish â†' Náhuatl,
Náhuatl â†' Spanish (Ohui.net)
*
Náhuatl-French dictionary Includes basic grammar
*
Náhuatl Names An introduction to Náhuatl names.
*
Books at Project Gutenberg in Nahuatl
