Nahuatl language



         


Nahuatl is a native language of central Mexico. It was the lingua franca of Mesoamerica for the millennium spanning from the 7th century through the late 16th century of the current era.

Also known as Mexican language, it was the language spoken by the people now known as Aztecs and their predecessors (the Colhua, Tecpanec, Acolhua, and the famous Toltecs in one interpretation of the term). Recently, there have begun to appear more and more suggestions, from several diverse fields of Mesoamerican research, that Nahuatl might have been one of the languages spoken at the legendary Teotihuacan.

Today, the term Nahuatl is frequently used in two different senses which are quickly becoming increasingly incompatible: to mean the Classical Nahuatl language described above (and which is no longer spoken on an everyday basis anywhere), and to mean any of a multitude of live dialects (some of them mutually unintelligible) that are still spoken by at least 1.5 million people in what is now Mexico. All of these dialects show influence from the Spanish language to various degrees, some of them much more than others, but it is important to note that some aspects of the essential nature of the Classical language have been lost in all of them (much as it happened to Classical Latin as it developed into the different Romance languages).

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Linguistic Summary

Name(s): Nahuatl, Mexican, or Aztec language
Family: Uto-Aztecan.
Speakers: >1,500,000 (most bilingual with Spanish).
Location: Mexico (Mexico (state), Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, and Guerrero).
Status: Non official. Marginated.
Code: NAH (ISO 639-2)
English loans: Nahuatl has provided English with some words for indigenous animals, fruits, vegetables, and tools:

"atlatl", "avocado", "axolotl", "chocolate", "cocoa", "cacao", "coyote", "ocelot", "peyote", "tomato", "tequila", "chilli", "chiclet".
Spanish loans: Nahuatl has been an exceedingly rich source of words for Spanish, as the following samples show.

Some of them are restricted to Mesoamerica but others are common to all the Spanish dialects:
acocil, aguacate, ajolote, amate, atole, ayate, cacahuate, camote, capulín, chamagoso, chapopote, chayote, chicle, chile, chipotle, chocolate, cuate, comal, copal, coyote, ejote, elote, epazote, escuincle, guacamole, guachinango, guajolote, huipil, hule, jacal, jícara, jitomate, malacate, mecate, mezcal, milpa, mitote, mole, nopal, ocelote, ocote, olote, paliacate, papalote, pepenar, petaca, petate, peyote, pinole, piocha, popote, pulque, quetzal, tamal, tianguis, tiza, tomate, tule, zacate, zapote, zopilote.

Besides, many well-known toponyms also come from Nahuatl, including Mexico (mëxihco), Guatemala (cuauhtëmallan), and Nicaragua (nicänähuac).
Writing: Before 1521: pictographic with rebus-style phonetics. After 1521: several alphabetic Amerindian languages), including a relatively large corpus of poetry (see also Nezahualcoyotl); the Nican Mopohua is an excellent early sample of transcribed Nahuatl.
Brief description: Classical Nahuatl makes use of 4 vowels (a,e,i,o) but distinguishes between a long and a short variant of each one of them. It uses two semivowels (/w/ and /y/), a glottal stop, and 10 other unvoiced consonants. It is an agglutinating, polysynthetic language that makes extensive use of compounding and derivation. It has very well developed honorific forms. Syllable structure is either CV or CVC. Stress, non-lexical in most varieties, always falls on the next-to-last vowel with the sole exception of the vocative, in which it falls on the last one.
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Overview

Nahuatl is still the most widely spoken Native American language in Mexico; however, most, if not all, of the speakers of Nahuatl are bilingual, having a working knowledge of the Spanish language. In fact, until recently, a significant number of the Nahuatl speakers outside the valley of Mexico were bilingual too, speaking both Nahuatl and their own mother tongue. A famous example of bilinguism was Malintzin ("La Malinche"), the native woman who translated between Nahuatl and a Maya language (and later learning Spanish as well) for Hernán Cortés.

Nahuatl is related to the languages spoken by the Hopi, Comanche, Pima, Shoshone, and other peoples of western North America, as they all belong to the Uto-Aztecan language family.

Nahuatl is an agglutinative, polysynthetic language. In Nahuatl there is no fixed difference between phrases or words, there are no infinitives, and no proper pronouns, and has been described as a language that is pure etymology. A Nahuatl word always consists of a prefix, then several root concepts, and a suffix. One can put as many root concepts, each one a syllable, as necessary, so some Nahuatl words are very long. It means also, that words can be created on the fly.

At the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec writing used mostly pictographs supplemented with a few ideograms. When needed it also used syllabic equivalences; Father Durán recorded how the tlacuilos could render a prayer in Latin using this system, but it was dificult to use. This 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 do.

The Spanish introduced the Roman script, which was then utilized to record a large body of Aztec prose and poetry, a fact which somewhat diminished the devastating loss caused by the burning of thousands of Aztec manuscripts by the Catholic priests. See Nahuatl transcription.

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Genealogy

*Estimated split date by glottochronology
**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 that might be present between Aztecan and Sonoran when compared with Soshonean is probably due to proximity contact, rather than to a common immediate parent stock other than Uto-Aztecan.
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Detailed description

I. Table of Nahuatl consonants and semivowels, in IPA notation (see IPA-SAMPA chart for Nahuatl) followed(→) by the proposed Nahuatl Standard Transcription:

  bilabial alveolar alveo-
lateral		 alveo-
palatal		 velar labialized
velar		 glottal
stop unaspirated  p → p  t → t &nbsp &nbsp  k → k  kw → q  aʔ... → à...
aspirated &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
ejective &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
affricate voiced &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
voiceless &nbsp  ts → z  tɬ  → tl/ł  tʃ → c &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
ejective &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
fricative voiced &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
voiceless &nbsp  s → s/ç  ɬ  → l  ʃ → x  h → h
liquid voiced &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
preglottalized &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
nasal voiced  m → m  n → n &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
preglottalized &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp
semivowels  w → v  j → y


II. Table of Nahuatl vowels, in IPA notation (see IPA-SAMPA chart for Nahuatl) followed(→) by the proposed Nahuatl Standard Transcription:

  front central back
  long short longshort long short
high tense  i: → ï
lax  i → i
mid tense  e: → ë  o: → ö
lax  e → e  o → o
low tense
lax  a: → ä a → a
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Dialects and local variants

List I. Nahuan subgroup members, sorted by number of speakers:

(name [ethnologue subgroup code] -- location(s) ~ approx. number of speakers)

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Bibliography

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See also

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