Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations in the United States.
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Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations in the United States.
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Nahuatl language has been spoken in central Mexico since at least the seventh century CE.
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Many words from Nahuatl were absorbed into Spanish and, from there, were diffused into hundreds of other languages in the region.
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English has absorbed words of Nahuatl language origin, including avocado, chayote, chili, chipotle, chocolate, atlatl, coyote, peyote, axolotl and tomato.
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Sometimes Nahuatl is applied to the Pipil language of El Salvador and Nicaragua.
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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.
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Pochutec is a scantily attested Nahuatl language, which became extinct in the 20th century, and which Campbell and Langacker classify as being outside general Aztec.
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Current subclassification of Nahuatl language rests on research by Canger, Canger and Lastra de Suarez.
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One example of the latter is the Nahuatl spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos, whose speakers call their language.
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Linguists commonly identify localized dialects of Nahuatl language by adding as a qualifier the name of the village or area where that variety is spoken.
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The first Nahuatl language grammar, written by Andres de Olmos, was published in 1547 – three years before the first French grammar.
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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.
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The Spanish permitted a great deal of autonomy in the local administration of indigenous towns during this period, and in many Nahuatl-speaking towns the language was the de facto administrative language both in writing and speech.
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At present Nahuatl language is mostly spoken in rural areas by an impoverished class of indigenous subsistence agriculturists.
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Nonetheless, progress towards institutionalizing Nahuatl language and securing linguistic rights for its speakers has been slow.
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Pipil, the southernmost Nahuan Nahuatl language, is spoken in El Salvador by a small number of speakers.
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The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States has resulted in the establishment of a few small Nahuatl language speaking communities in the US, particularly in California, New York, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
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Nahuatl language has neither case nor gender, but Classical Nahuatl language and some modern dialects distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns.
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Nahuatl language verb is quite complex and inflects for many grammatical categories.
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Classical Nahuatl language had a passive voice, but this is not found in most modern varieties.
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Many Nahuatl language varieties allow forming verbal compounds with two or more verbal roots.
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Nahuatl language allows all possible orderings of the three basic sentence constituents.
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Michel Launey argues that Classical Nahuatl language had a verb-initial basic word order with extensive freedom for variation, which was then used to encode pragmatic functions such as focus and topicality.
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Many Nahuatl words have been borrowed into the Spanish language, most of which are terms designating things indigenous to the Americas.
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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.
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Nahuatl language literature encompasses a diverse array of genres and styles, the documents themselves composed under many different circumstances.
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One of the most important works of prose written in Nahuatl language is the twelve-volume compilation generally known as the Florentine Codex, authored in the mid-16th century by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagun and a number of Nahua speakers.
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Nahuatl language poetry is preserved in principally two sources: the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los senores de Nueva Espana, both collections of Aztec songs written down in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Classical Nahuatl language was rich in such diphrasal metaphors, many of which are explicated by Sahagun in the Florentine Codex and by Andres de Olmos in his Arte.
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