Checked content


Related subjects: Languages

Did you know...


Mexicano, Nahuatl, and others
Aztec woman speaking.jpg
Native to Mexico and El Salvador
Region Mexico State, Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Morelos, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Durango,
and immigrants in United States, El Salvador, Guatemala and Canada
Ethnicity Nahua peoples
Native speakers 1.45 million  (2000)
Language family
  • Aztecan
    • General Aztec
      • Nahuatl
Early forms:
  • Nahuatl
Western Peripheral Nahuatl
Eastern Peripheral Nahuatl
Huastecan Nahuatl
Central Nahuatl
Pipil Nahuat
Official status
Official language in  Mexico
Regulated by Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas
Language codes
ISO 639-2 nah
ISO 639-3 nci Classical Nahuatl
For modern varieties, see List of Nahuan languages.

Nahuatl (Nahuatl pronunciation:  [ˈnaːwatɬ], with stress on the first syllable) is a language of the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken by an estimated 1.5 million Nahua people, most of whom live in Central Mexico; some who live in El Salvador are known as the Pipil people. All Nahuan languages are indigenous to Mesoamerica.


Today Nahuatl varieties are spoken in scattered communities, mostly in rural areas throughout central Mexico. There are considerable differences among varieties, and some are mutually unintelligible. They have all been subject to varying degrees of influence from Spanish. No modern Nahuatl 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. Under Mexico's Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ("General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples") promulgated in 2003, Nahuatl and the other 63 indigenous languages of Mexico are recognized as lenguas nacionales ("national languages") in the regions where they are spoken, enjoying the same status as Spanish within their region.

Nahuatl is a language with a complex morphology characterized by polysynthesis and agglutination ( agglutinative language), allowing the construction of long words with complex meanings out of several stems and affixes. Through centuries of coexistence with the other indigenous Mesoamerican languages, Nahuatl has absorbed many influences, coming to form part of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.


The place of Nahuatl within Uto-Aztecan


General Aztec encompasses the Nahuatl and Pipil languages. Pochutec is a scantily attested language which went extinct in the 20th century which Campbell and Langacker classify as being outside of general Aztec. Other researchers argue that Pochutec should be considered a divergent variant of the western periphery.



Pre-Columbian period

On the issue of geographic origin, linguists during the 20th century agreed that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in the southwestern United States. Recent studies have tried to uncover the history of the Nahuatl language by advocating a migration of Asian populations across the Bering strait. Studies that have found word pairings between Nahuatl and Altaic Ural-Turkic (i.e. mountain, Nahuatl: Tepec, Turkish: Tepe.) Apart from these recent studies, evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory supports a southward diffusion across the American continent thesis, specifically that speakers of early Nahuan languages migrated from the northern Mexican deserts 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. This hypothesis and the analyses of data that it rests upon have received serious criticism.






Colonial period

With the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, the tables were turned on the Nahuatl language: it was displaced as the dominant regional language. Nevertheless, due to the Spanish making alliances with first the Nahuatl speakers from Tlaxcala and later with the conquered Aztecs, the Nahuatl language continued spreading throughout Mesoamerica in the decades after the conquest, when Spanish expeditions with thousands of Nahua soldiers marched north and south to conquer new territories. Jesuit missions in northern Mexico and the southwestern US region often included a barrio of Tlaxcaltec soldiers who remained to guard the mission. For example, some fourteen years after the northeastern city of Saltillo, Coahuila, was founded in 1577, a Tlaxcaltec community was resettled in a separate nearby village, San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala to cultivate the land and aid colonization efforts that had stalled in the face of local hostility to the Spanish settlement. As for the conquest of modern day Central America, Pedro de Alvarado conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec allies, who then settled outside of modern day Antigua. Similar episodes occurred across El Salvador and Honduras, with Nahuatl speakers settling in communities that were often named after them. In Honduras for example, two of these barrios are called "Mexicapa"; another in El Salvador is called "Mejicanos".





Modern period

Nahuatl Speakers over 5 years of age in the ten states with most speakers ( 2000 census data). Absolute and relative numbers. Percentages given are in comparison to the total population of the corresponding state. Source: INEGI (2005:4).
Region Totals Percentages
Federal District 37,450 0.44%
Guerrero 136,681 4.44%
Hidalgo 221,684 9.92%
Mexico (state) 55,802 0.43%
Morelos 18,656 1.20%
Oaxaca 10,979 0.32%
Puebla 416,968 8.21%
San Luis Potosí 138,523 6.02%
Tlaxcala 23,737 2.47%
Veracruz 338,324 4.90%
Rest of Mexico 50,132 0.10%
Total: 1,448,937 1.49%


From the early 20th century to at least the mid-1980s, educational policies in Mexico focused on the hispanization (castellanización) of indigenous communities, teaching only Spanish and discouraging the use of indigenous languages. As a result, today there is no group of Nahuatl speakers having attained general literacy in Nahuatl; while their literacy rate in Spanish also remains much lower than the national average. Even so, Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people, of whom around 10% are monolingual. The survival of Nahuatl as a whole is not imminently endangered, but the survival of certain dialects is, and some dialects have already become extinct within the last few decades of the 20th century.

The 1990s saw the onset of diametric changes in official Mexican government policies towards indigenous and linguistic rights. Developments of accords in the international rights arena combined with domestic pressures led to legislative reforms and the creation of decentralized government agencies like CDI and INALI with responsibilities for the promotion and protection of indigenous communities and languages. In particular, the federal Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ["General Law on the Language Rights of the Indigenous Peoples", promulgated 13 March 2003] recognizes all the country's indigenous languages, including Nahuatl, as " national languages" and gives indigenous people the right to use them in all spheres of public and private life. In Article 11, it grants access to compulsory, bilingual and intercultural education.


Geographic distribution


Today, a spectrum of Nahuatl dialects are spoken in an scattered areas stretching from the northern state of Durango to Veracruz in the southeast. Pipil (also known as Nawat), the southernmost Nahuan language, is spoken in El Salvador by a small number of speakers. According to IRIN-International, the Nawat Language Recovery Initiative project, there are no reliable figures for the contemporary numbers of speakers of Pipil / Nawat. Numbers may range anywhere from "perhaps a few hundred people, perhaps only a few dozen."

According to the 2000 census of the Mexican statistical Institute INEGI, Nahuatl is spoken by an estimated 1.45 million people, some 198,000 (14.9%) of whom are monolingual. There are many more female than male monolinguals, females represent nearly two thirds of the total number. The states of Guerrero and Hidalgo have the highest rates of monolingual Nahuatl speakers relative to the total Nahuatl speaking population. Guerrero has 24.2% and Hidalgo 22.6%, monolinguals. For most other states the percentage of monolinguals among the speakers is less than 5%. This means that in most states more than 95% of the Nahuatl speaking population are bilingual in Spanish. These statistics do not consider the possibility of monolingual speakers of Nahuatl also speaking additional indigenous languages.

The largest concentrations of Nahuatl speakers are found in the states of Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí, and Guerrero. Significant populations are also found in Mexico State, Morelos, and the Federal District, with smaller communities in Michoacán and Durango. Nahuatl became extinct during the 20th century in the states of Jalisco and Colima. As a result of internal migrations within the country, Nahuatl speaking communities exist in all of Mexico's states. The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States has resulted in the establishment of a few small Nahuatl speaking communities in that country, particularly in California, New York, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Subclassification of Nahuatl dialects



The speakers of Nahuatl themselves often refer to their language as either Mexicano or some word derived from mācēhualli, the Nahuatl word for "commoner". One example of the latter is the case for Nahuatl spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos, whose speakers call their language mösiehuali. The Pipil of El Salvador do not call their own language "Pipil", as most linguists do, but rather nawat. The Nahuas of Durango call their language Mexicanero. Speakers of Nahuatl of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec call their language mela'tajtol ("the straight language"). Some speech communities use "Nahuatl" as the name for their language although this 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.


Current subclassification of Nahuatl rests on research by Canger (1980, 1988) and Lastra de Suárez (1986). Canger introduced the scheme of a Central grouping several Peripheral groupings, and Lastra confirmed this notion, differing in some details. Each of the groupings is defined by shared characteristic grammatical features which in turn suggest a shared history. Canger includes dialects of La Huasteca in the Centre Peripheral group, while Lastra de Suárez places them in their own subgroup of Peripheral. Below, Lastra de Suarez's classification is combined with Campbell 1997's classification of Uto-Aztecan. (Campbell's positing of higher level subgroupings of Uto-Aztecan, specifically "Shoshonean" and "Sonoran", above the eight uncontroversial branches is not yet generally accepted. Also, Lastra's including Pipil under Nahuatl is not accepted by Campbell, who has been the leading investigator of Pipil.)

  • Uto-Aztecan 5000 BP*
    • Aztecan 2000 BP (AKA Nahuan)
      • PochutecCoast of Oaxaca
      • General Aztec (including Nahuatl)
        • Centre Dialects of central Puebla, Tlaxcala, central Veracruz, Morelos, Mexico state, central and southern Guerrero


Nahuan languages are defined as a subgroup of Uto-Aztecan by having undergone a number of shared changes from the Uto-Aztecan protolanguage (PUA). The table below shows the phonemic inventory of Classical Nahuatl as an example of a typical Nahuan language. In some dialects the /t͡ɬ/ phoneme that is so common in classical Nahuatl has changed into either /t/ as it has happened in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl, Mexicanero and Pipil or into /l/ as it has happened in Nahuatl of Pómaro, Michoacán. Many dialects no longer distinguish between short and long vowels. Some have introduced completely new vowel qualities to compensate for this, as is the case for Tetelcingo Nahuatl. Others have developed a pitch accent, such as Nahuatl of Oapan, Guerrero. Many modern dialects have also borrowed phonemes from Spanish, such as /b, d, ɡ, f/.


The consonants of classical Nahuatl
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
central lateral plain labialized
Nasal m n
Plosive p t k ʔ
Affricate ts
Continuant s l ʃ (h)*
Semivowel j w
The vowels of classical Nahuatl
Front Central Back
long short long short long short
Close i o
Mid e
Open a
* The glottal phoneme (called the " saltillo") only occurs after vowels. In many modern dialects it is realized as an [h], but in classical Nahuatl and in other modern dialects it is a glottal stop [ʔ].







Many varieties of Nahuatl have productive reduplication. By reduplicating the first syllable of a root a new word is formed. In nouns this is often used to form plurals, e.g. /tlaːkatl/ "man" > /tlaːtlaːkah/ "men", but also in some varieties to form diminutives, honorifics, or for derivations. In verbs reduplication is often used to form a reiterative (expressing repetition), e.g. /kitta/ "he sees it", /kihitta/ "he looks at it repeatedly".




"I shall make somebody give something to you" (Classical Nahuatl)




Singular noun:

"coyote" (Classical Nahuatl)

Plural animate noun:

"coyotes" (Classical Nahuatl)

Plural animate noun w. reduplication:

"coyotes" (Classical Nahuatl)


Absolutive noun:

"house" (Classical Nahuatl)

Possessed noun:

"my house" (Classical Nahuatl)

Possessed plural:

"my houses" (Classical Nahuatl)

Nahuatl does not have grammatical case but uses what is sometimes called a relational noun to describe spatial (and other) relations. These morphemes cannot appear alone but must always occur after a noun or a possessive prefix. They are also often called postpositions or locative suffixes. In some ways these locative constructions resemble, and can be thought of as, locative case constructions. Most modern dialects have incorporated prepositions from Spanish that are competing with or that have completely replaced relational nouns.

Uses of relational noun/postposition/locative -pan with a possessive prefix:

"in/on me" (Classical Nahuatl)
"in/on it" (Classical Nahuatl)
iː-pan kal-li
its-in house-ABSOLUTIVE
"in the house" (Classical Nahuatl)

Use with a preceding noun stem:

"in the house" (Classical Nahuatl)




First person plural pronoun in Classical Nahuatl:

tehwaːntin "we"

First person plural pronouns in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuat:

nejamēn ([nehameːn]) "We but not you"
tejamēn ([tehameːn]) "We including you (and others)"


Non-honorific forms:

tehwaːtl "you sg."
amehwaːntin "you pl."
yehwatl "he/she/it"

Honorific forms

tehwaːtzin "you sg. honorific"
amehwaːntzitzin "you pl. honorific"
yehwaːtzin "he/she honorific"




Most Nahuatl varieties have a number of ways to alter the valency of a verb. Classical Nahuatl had a passive voice (also sometimes defined as an impersonal voice), but this is not found in most modern varieties. However the applicative and causative voices are found in many modern dialects. Many Nahuatl varieties also allow forming verbal compounds with two or more verbal roots.


"I want to feed them" (Classical Nahuatl)



Familiar verbal form:

"you run"(Classical Nahuatl)

Honorific verbal form:

"You run"(said with respect) (Classical Nahuatl)



Michel Launey argues that Classical Nahuatl 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. The same has been argued for some contemporary varieties.

newal no-nobia
I my-fianceé

It has been argued that classical Nahuatl syntax is best characterised by "omnipredicativity", meaning that any noun or verb in the language is in fact a full predicative sentence. A radical interpretation of Nahuatl syntactic typology, this nonetheless seems to account for some of the language's peculiarities, for example, why nouns must also carry the same agreement prefixes as verbs, and why predicates do not require any noun phrases to function as their arguments. For example the verbal form tzahtzi means "he/she/it shouts", and with the second person prefix titzahtzi it means "you shout". Nouns are inflected in the same way: the noun "conētl" means not just "child", but also "it is a child", and ticonētl means "you are a child". This prompts the omnipredicative interpretation, which posits that all nouns are also predicates. According to this interpretation a phrase such as tzahtzi in conētl should not be interpreted as meaning just "the child screams" but, more rather, "it screams, (the one that) is a child".

Contact phenomena



pero āmo tēchentenderoah lo que tlen tictoah en mexicano

In some modern dialects basic word order has become a fixed subject–verb–object, probably under influence from Spanish. Other changes in the syntax of modern Nahuatl include the use of Spanish prepositions instead of native postpositions or relational nouns and the reinterpretation of original postpositions/relational nouns into prepositions. In the following example, from Michoacán Nahual, the postposition -ka meaning "with" appears used as a preposition, with no preceding object:

ti-ya ti-k-wika ka tel
you-go you-it-carry with you







Likewise a number of English words have been borrowed from Nahuatl through Spanish. Two of the most prominent are undoubtedly chocolate and tomato (from Nahuatl tomatl). Other common words such as coyote (from Nahuatl coyotl), avocado (from Nahuatl ahuacatl) and chile or chili (from Nahuatl chilli). The word chicle is also derived from Nahuatl tzictli "sticky stuff, chicle". Some other English words from Nahuatl are: Aztec, (from aztecatl); cacao (from Nahuatl cacahuatl 'shell, rind'); ocelot (from ocelotl). In Mexico many words for common everyday concepts attest to the close contact between Spanish and Nahuatl, so many in fact that entire dictionaries of "mexicanismos" (words particular to Mexican Spanish) have been published tracing Nahuatl etymologies, as well as Spanish words with origins in other indigenous languages. Many well known toponyms also come from Nahuatl, including Mexico (from the Nahuatl word for the Aztec capital mexihco) and Guatemala (from the word cuauhtēmallan).

Writing and literature




The Spanish introduced the Latin script, which was used to record a large body of Aztec prose, poetry and mundane documentation such as testaments, administrative documents, legal letters, etc. In a matter of decades pictorial writing was completely replaced with the Latin alphabet. No standardized Latin orthography has been developed for Nahuatl, and no general consensus has arisen for the representation of many sounds in Nahuatl that are lacking in Spanish, such as long vowels and the glottal stop. The orthography most accurately representing the phonemes of Nahuatl was developed in the 17th century by the Jesuit Horacio Carochi. Carochi's orthography used two different accents: a macron to represent long vowels and a grave for the saltillo, and sometimes an acute accent for short vowels. This orthography did not achieve a wide following outside of the Jesuit community.




Among the indigenous languages of the Americas, extensive corpus of surviving literature in Nahuatl dating as far back as the 16th century may be considered unique. Nahuatl literature encompasses a diverse array of genres and styles, the documents themselves composed under many different circumstances. It appears that the preconquest Nahua had a distinction much like the European distinction between " prose" and "poetry", the first called tlahtolli "speech" and the second cuicatl "song".







ye maca timiquican
"May we not die"
ye maca tipolihuican
"May we not perish"


in xochitl, in cuicatl
"The flower, the song" – meaning "poetry"
in cuitlapilli, in atlapalli
in toptli, in petlacalli
"the chest, the box" meaning "something secret"
in yollohtli, in eztli
"the heart, the blood" – meaning "cacao"
in iztlactli, in tenqualactli
"the drool, the spittle" – meaning "lies"
Retrieved from ""