sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl
Nahuatl (Nahuatlahtolli)
Spoken in: Mexico
Region: Mexico (state), Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, and Guerrero
Total speakers: >1.5 million
Ranking: Not in top 100
Genetic classification: Uto-Aztecan
Southern Uto-Aztecan
Aztecan
Nahuatl
Official status
Official language of: -
Regulated by: Mexico:
Language codes
ISO 639-1 nah
ISO 639-2 nah
SIL NAI
Nahuatl is a Native American language indigenous to central Mexico. It was the lingua franca of Mesoamerica during the 7th century AD through to the late 16th century, at which time its prominence and influence was interrupted by the Spanish conquest of the New World.
Also known as Mexican language, or the language of the Mexica (ie. Aztecs), it was not only spoken by the Aztecs but also 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:
the Classical Nahuatl language described above (and which is no longer spoken on an everyday basis anywhere)
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).
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 learned Spanish as well) for Hernn Corts.
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Classification
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.
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Genealogy
Uto-Aztecan 5000 BP*
Soshonean (Northern Uto-Aztecan)
Sonoran**
Aztecan 2000 BP
Nahuan
Nahuatl (Central & Northern Nahuan) --Mxico(State), Puebla, Hidalgo
Nahual (Western Nahuan) --Michoacn
Nahuat (Eastern Nahuan) --Veracruz
Nawat (Southern Nahuan, also known as "Pipil") --Pacific coast of Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador
Pochutec --Coast of Oaxaca
*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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Geographic distribution
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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)
Huasteca Este [NAI] Hidalgo, Western Veracruz, Northern Puebla ~450,000
Huasteca Oeste [NHQ] San Luis Potos, Western Hidalgo ~450,000
Guerrero [NAH] Guerrero ~200,000
Orizaba [NLV] Central Veracruz ~140,000
Puebla Sureste [NHS] Southeast Puebla ~135,000
Puebla Sierra[AZZ] Puebla Highlands ~125,000
Puebla Norte [NCJ] Northern Puebla ~66,000
Central [NHN] Tlaxcala, Puebla ~50,000
Istmo-Mecayapan [NAU] Southern Veracruz ~20,000
Puebla Central [NCX] Central Puebla ~18,000
Morelos [NHM] Morelos ~15,000
Oaxaca Norte [NHY] Northwestern Oaxaca, Southeastern Puebla ~10,000
Huaxcaleca [NHQ] Puebla ~7,000
Istmo-Pajapan [NHP] Southern Veracruz ~7,000
Istmo-Cosoleacaque [NHK] Eastern Morelos, Northwestern Coastal Chiapas, Southern Veracruz ~5,500
Ixhuatlancillo [NHX] Central Veracruz ~4,000
Tetelcingo [NHG] Morelos ~3,500
Michoacn [NCL] Michoacn ~3,000
Santa Mara de la Alta [NHZ] Northwest Puebla ~3,000
Tenango [NHI] Northern Puebla ~2,000
Tlamacazapa [NUZ] Morelos ~1,500
Coatepec [NAZ] Southwestern Mxico (State), Northwestern Guerrero ~1,500
Durango [NLN] Southern Durango ~1,000
Ometepec [NHT] Southern Guerrero, Western Oaxaca ~500
Temascaltepec [AZZ] Southwestern Mxico (State) ~300
Tlalitzlipa [NHJ] Puebla ~100
Pipil [PPL] El Salvador ~20
Tabasco [NHC] Tabasco (extinct?)
Classical [NCI] Valley of Mxico (academic and literary)
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Sounds
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 /j/), 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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Consonants and semivowels
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 k → k kw → q aʔ... → ...
aspirated &nb sp;
ejective &nbs p;
affricate voiced
voiceless ts → z tɬ → tl/ł tʃ → c
ejective &nbs p;
fricative voiced
voiceless s → s/ ɬ → l ʃ → x h → h
liquid voiced
preglottalized &nbs p;
nasal voiced m → m n → n   ;
preglottalized &nbs p;
semivowels w → v j → y
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Vowels
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 long short long short
high tense i: →
lax i → i
mid tense e: → o: →
lax e → e o → o
low tense
lax a: → a → a
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Grammar
Nahuatl is an agglutinative, polysynthetic language. In Nahuatl there is no fixed difference between phrases or words, no infinitives, and no proper pronouns. Nahuatl has been described as a language that is pure etymology. A Nahuatl word always consists of a prefix, followed by several root concepts, followed by a suffix. One can put together as many one-syllable root concepts as necessary, so some Nahuatl words are very long. This also means that new words can be created on the fly.
The typology of Nahuatl has, by a minority of linguists, been regarded as oligosynthetic. This was first proposed in the early 20th Century by Benjamin Whorf, but was largely dismissed by the linguistic community by the mid-1950s. In 2004, linguist and computer scientist Ernst Herrera Legorreta put forward new evidence in support of Whorf's original claim. It has yet to be seen whether this will change the academic consensus.
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Vocabulary
See the list of Nahuatl words and list of words of Nahuatl origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project.
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Words loaned to other languages
Main article: words of Nahuatl origin
Nahuatl has provided the English language with some words for indigenous animals, fruits, vegetables, and tools.
Due to extensive Mexican-Philippine contacts, there are estimated 250 words of Nahuatl origin in the Filipino language, among such are kamote (sweet potato), palengke (flea market), panotsa (peant brittle), sayote (chayote), tiyangge (seasonal market), and tsokolate (chocolate), and also place names, such as Zapote, a town near Manila, and Macabebe, and Sasmuan, towns in Pampanga province.
Nahuatl has been an exceedingly rich source of words for the Spanish language, 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, capuln, chamagoso, chapopote, chayote, chicle, chile, chipotle, chocolate, cuate, comal, copal, coyote, ejote, elote, epazote, escuincle, guacamole, guachinango, guajolote, huipil, hule, jacal, jcara, 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.
Many well-known toponyms also come from Nahuatl, including Mexico (mxihco), Guatemala (cuauhtmallan), and Nicaragua (nicnhuac).
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Writing system
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 Durn recorded how the tlacuilos 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 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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History
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Literature
Nahuatl literature is extensive (probably the most extensive of all Amerindian languages), including a relatively large corpus of poetry (see also Nezahualcoyotl); the Nican Mopohua is an excellent early sample of transcribed Nahuatl.