Nahuatl (English: /ˈnɑːwɑːtəl/ NAH-wah-təl;[5] Nahuatl pronunciation: [ˈnaːwat͡ɬ] ),[cn 1] Aztec, or Mexicano[8] is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about 1.7 million Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations in the United States.
Nahuatl has been spoken in central Mexico since at least the seventh century CE.[9] It was the language of the Mexica, who dominated what is now central Mexico during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican history. During the centuries preceding the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, the Aztecs had expanded to incorporate a large part of central Mexico. Their influence caused the variety of Nahuatl spoken by the residents of Tenochtitlan to become a prestige language in Mesoamerica.
Following the Spanish conquest, Spanish colonists and missionaries introduced the Latin script, and Nahuatl became a literary language. Many chronicles, grammars, works of poetry, administrative documents and codices were written in it during the 16th and 17th centuries.[10] This early literary language based on the Tenochtitlan variety has been labeled Classical Nahuatl. It is among the most studied and best-documented Indigenous languages of the Americas.[11]
Today, Nahuan languages are spoken in scattered communities, mostly in rural areas throughout central Mexico and along the coastline. A smaller number of speakers exists in immigrant communities in the United States.[12] There are considerable differences among varieties, and some are not mutually intelligible. Huasteca Nahuatl, with over one million speakers, is the most-spoken variety. All varieties have been subject to varying degrees of influence from Spanish. No modern Nahuan 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.[13] Under Mexico's General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, promulgated in 2003,[14] Nahuatl and the other 63 indigenous languages of Mexico are recognized as lenguas nacionales ('national languages') in the regions where they are spoken. They are given the same status as Spanish within their respective regions.[cn 2]
Nahuan languages exhibit a complex morphology, or system of word formation, characterized by polysynthesis and agglutination. This means that morphemes – words or fragments of words that each contain their own separate meaning – are often strung together to make longer complex words.
Through a very long period of development alongside other indigenous Mesoamerican languages, they have absorbed many influences, coming to form part of the Mesoamerican language area. Many words from Nahuatl were absorbed into Spanish and, from there, were diffused into hundreds of other languages in the region. Most of these loanwords denote things indigenous to central Mexico, which the Spanish heard mentioned for the first time by their Nahuatl names. English has also absorbed words of Nahuatl origin, including avocado, chayote, chili, chipotle, chocolate, atlatl, coyote, peyote, axolotl and tomato. These words have since been adopted into dozens of languages around the world.[15][16] The names of several countries, Mexico, Guatemala and possibly Nicaragua, derive from Nahuatl.[17][18][19]
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As a language label, the term Nahuatl encompasses a group of closely related languages or divergent dialects within the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. The Mexican Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (Indigenous Languages Institute) recognizes 30 individual varieties within the "language group" labeled Nahuatl. The Ethnologue recognizes 28 varieties with separate ISO codes. Sometimes Nahuatl is also applied to the Nawat language of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Regardless of whether Nahuatl is considered to refer to a dialect continuum or a group of separate languages, the varieties form a single branch within the Uto-Aztecan family, descended from a single Proto-Nahuan language. Within Mexico, the question of whether to consider individual varieties to be languages or dialects of a single language is highly political.[20]
In the past, the branch of Uto-Aztecan to which Nahuatl belongs has been called Aztecan. From the 1990s onward, the alternative designation Nahuan has been frequently used instead, especially in Spanish-language publications. The Nahuan (Aztecan) branch of Uto-Aztecan is widely accepted as having two divisions: General Aztec and Pochutec.[21]
General Aztec encompasses the Nahuatl and Pipil languages.[cn 3] Pochutec is a scantily attested language, which became extinct in the 20th century,[22][23] and which Campbell and Langacker classify as being outside general Aztec. Other researchers have argued that Pochutec should be considered a divergent variant of the western periphery.[24]
Nahuatl denotes at least Classical Nahuatl, together with related modern languages spoken in Mexico. The inclusion of Pipil in this group is debated among linguists. Lyle Campbell (1997) classified Pipil as separate from the Nahuatl branch within general Aztecan, whereas dialectologists such as Una Canger, Karen Dakin, Yolanda Lastra, and Terrence Kaufman have preferred to include Pipil within the General Aztecan branch, citing close historical ties with the eastern peripheral dialects of General Aztec.[25]
Current subclassification of Nahuatl rests on research by Canger (1980), Canger (1988) and Lastra de Suárez (1986). Canger introduced the scheme of a Central grouping and two Peripheral groups, and Lastra confirmed this notion, differing in some details. Canger & Dakin (1985) demonstrated a basic split between Eastern and Western branches of Nahuan, considered to reflect the oldest division of the proto-Nahuan speech community. Canger originally considered the central dialect area to be an innovative subarea within the Western branch, but in 2011, she suggested that it arose as an urban koiné language with features from both Western and Eastern dialect areas. Canger (1988) tentatively included dialects of La Huasteca in the Central group, while Lastra de Suárez (1986) places them in the Eastern Periphery, which was followed by Kaufman (2001).
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 ones or with the speakers' own name for their specific variety. The word Nahuatl is probably derived from the word nāhuatlahtōlli [naːwat͡ɬaʔˈtoːliˀ] ('clear language'). The language was formerly called Aztec because it was spoken by the Central Mexican peoples known as Aztecs (Nahuatl pronunciation: [asˈteːkaḁ]). During the period of the Aztec empire centered in Mexico-Tenochtitlan the language came to be identified with the politically dominant mēxihcah [meːˈʃiʔkaḁ] ethnic group, and consequently the Nahuatl language was often described as mēxihcacopa [meːʃiʔkaˈkopaˀ] (literally 'in the manner of Mexicas')[26] or mēxihcatlahtolli 'Mexica language'. Now, the term Aztec is rarely used for modern Nahuan languages, but 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 Nahuan). Since 1978, the term General Aztec has been adopted by linguists to refer to the languages of the Aztecan branch excluding the Pochutec language.[27]
Speakers of Nahuatl generally refer to their language as either Mexicano[28] or with a cognate derived from mācēhualli, the Nahuatl word for 'commoner'. One example of the latter is the Nahuatl spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos, whose speakers call their language mösiehuali.[29] The Pipil people of El Salvador refer to their language as Nāwat.[30] The Nahuas of Durango call their language Mexicanero.[31] Speakers of Nahuatl of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec call their language mela'tajtol ('the straight language').[32] Some speech communities use Nahuatl as the name for their language, although it 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.[33]
On the issue of geographic origin, the consensus of linguists during the 20th century was that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in the southwestern United States.[34] Evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory supports the thesis of a southward diffusion across the North American continent, specifically that speakers of early Nahuan languages migrated from Aridoamerica 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.[35] This hypothesis and the analyses of data that it rests upon have received serious criticism.[36][37]
The proposed 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.[38][39][40] Before reaching the Mexican Plateau, pre-Nahuan groups probably spent a period of time in contact with the Uto-Aztecan Cora and Huichol of northwestern Mexico.[41]
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.[42] It was presumed by scholars during the 19th and early 20th centuries that Teotihuacan had been founded by Nahuatl-speakers of, but 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.[43] In the late 20th century, epigraphical evidence has suggested the possibility that other Mesoamerican languages were borrowing vocabulary from Proto-Nahuan much earlier than previously thought.[44]
In Mesoamerica the Mayan, Oto-Manguean and Mixe–Zoque languages had coexisted for millennia. This had given rise to the Mesoamerican language area. After the Nahuas migrated into the Mesoamerican cultural zone, their language likely adopted various areal traits,[45] which included relational nouns and calques added to the vocabulary, and a distinctly Mesoamerican grammatical construction for indicating possession.
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 bulk of Nahuan speakers.[9] Some Nahuan groups migrated south along the Central American isthmus, reaching as far as Nicaragua. The critically endangered Pipil language of El Salvador is the only living descendant of the variety of Nahuatl once spoken south of present-day Mexico.[46]
During the 7th century, Nahuan speakers rose to power in central Mexico. The people of the Toltec culture of Tula, 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. The Mexica were among the latest groups to arrive in the Valley of Mexico; they settled on an island in the Lake Texcoco, subjugated the surrounding tribes, and ultimately an empire named Tenochtitlan. Mexica political and linguistic influence ultimately extended into Central America, and Nahuatl became a lingua franca among merchants and elites in Mesoamerica, such as with the Maya Kʼicheʼ people.[47] As Tenochtitlan grew to become the largest urban center in Central America and one of the largest in the world at the time,[48] it attracted speakers of Nahuatl from diverse areas giving birth to an urban form of Nahuatl with traits from many dialects. This urbanized variety of Tenochtitlan is what came to be known as Classical Nahuatl as documented in colonial times.[49]
With the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, Nahuatl was displaced as the dominant regional language, but remained important in Nahua communities under Spanish rule. Nahuatl was documented extensively during the colonial period in Tlaxcala, Cuernavaca, Culhuacan, Coyoacan, Toluca and other locations in the Valley of Mexico and beyond. In the 1970s, scholars of Mesoamerican ethnohistory have analyzed local-level texts in Nahuatl and other indigenous languages to gain insight into cultural change in the colonial era via linguistic changes, known at present as the New Philology.