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Nahuatl ( ;Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about 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 AD. 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 , grammars, works of poetry, administrative documents and Aztec codices were written in it during the 16th and 17th centuries. 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.
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 predominantly in the United States. 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 language contact 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. Under Mexico's General Law of Linguistic Rights of the 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. They are given the same status as Spanish within their respective regions.By the provisions of Article IV: Las lenguas indígenas...y el español son lenguas nacionales...y tienen la misma validez en su territorio, localización y contexto en que se hablen. ("The indigenous languages ... and Spanish are national languages ... and have the same validity in their territory, location and context in which they are spoken.")
Nahuan languages exhibit a complex morphology, or system of word formation, characterized by polysynthesis and agglutination. This means that morphemeswords or fragments of words that each contain their own separate meaningare 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 pepper, chipotle, chocolate, atlatl, coyote, peyote, axolotl and tomato. These words have since been adopted into dozens of languages around the world. The names of several countries, Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, derive from Nahuatl.
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.; ; ;
General Aztec encompasses the Nahuatl and Pipil languages.: "General Aztec is a generally accepted term referring to the most shallow common stage, reconstructed for all present-day Nahuatl varieties; it does not include the Pochutec dialect." Pochutec is a scantily attested language, which became extinct in the 20th century, 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.;
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 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.;
Current subclassification of Nahuatl rests on research by , and . Canger introduced the scheme of a Central grouping and two Peripheral groups, and Lastra confirmed this notion, differing in some details. 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. tentatively included dialects of La Huasteca in the Central group, while places them in the Eastern Periphery, which was followed by .
The language was formerly called Aztec because it was spoken by the Central Mexican peoples known as (). 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.
Nahuatl came to be identified with the politically dominant mēxihcah ethnic group, and consequently the Nahuatl language has been called mēxihcacopa (literally 'in the manner of Mexicas') or mēxihcatlahtolli 'Mexica language'. The language is now called mexicano by many of its native speakers, a term dating to the early colonial period and usually pronounced the Spanish way, with or rather than .
Many Nahuatl speakers refer to their language with a cognate derived from mācēhualli, the Nahuatl word for 'commoner'. One example of that is the Nahuatl spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos, whose speakers call their language mösiehuali. The Pipil people of El Salvador refer to their language as Nawat language. The Nahuas of Durango call their language Mexicanero. Speakers of Nahuatl of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec call their language melaꞌtahtol ('the straight language').
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. Before reaching the Mexican Plateau, pre-Nahuan groups probably spent a period of time in contact with the Uto-Aztecan Cora language and Huichol language of northwestern Mexico.
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.; 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.; ; 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.; ; ; ;
In Mesoamerica the Mayan languages, 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,; which included and 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. 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.;
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. As Tenochtitlan grew to become the largest urban center in Central America and one of the largest in the world at the time, 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.
As the Spanish had made alliances with Nahuatl-speaking peoples—initially from Tlaxcala, and later the conquered Mexica of Tenochtitlan—Nahuatl continued spreading throughout Mesoamerica in the decades after the conquest. Spanish expeditions with thousands of Nahua soldiers marched north and south to conquer new territories. Jesuit missions in what is now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States often included a barrio of Tlaxcaltec soldiers who remained to guard the mission. For example, some fourteen years after the northeastern city of Saltillo 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.. The Tlaxcaltec community remained legally separate until the 19th century. Pedro de Alvarado conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec allies, who then settled outside of modern Antigua Guatemala.
As a part of their efforts, missionaries belonging to several —principally Jesuits, as well as Franciscan and Dominican Order friars—introduced the Latin alphabet to the Nahuas. Within twenty years of the Spanish arrival, texts in Nahuatl were being written using the Latin script.; Simultaneously, schools were founded, such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in 1536, which taught both Indigenous and classical European languages to both Native Americans and priests. Missionaries authored of for Indigenous languages for use by priests. The first Nahuatl grammar, written by Andrés de Olmos, was published in 1547–3 years before the first grammar in French, and 39 years before the first one in English. By 1645, four more had been published, authored respectively by Alonso de Molina (1571), Antonio del Rincón (1595), Diego de Galdo Guzmán (1642), and Horacio Carochi (1645). Carochi's is today considered the most important colonial-era grammar of Nahuatl. Carochi has been particularly important for scholars working in the New Philology, such that there is a 2001 English translation of Carochi's 1645 grammar by James Lockhart. Through contact with Spanish the Nahuatl language adopted many loan words, and as bilingualism intensified, changes in the grammatical structure of Nahuatl followed.
In 1570, King Philip II of Spain decreed that Nahuatl should become the official language of the colonies of New Spain to facilitate communication between the Spanish and natives of the colonies. This led to Spanish missionaries teaching Nahuatl to Amerindians living as far south as Honduras and El Salvador. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Classical Nahuatl was used as a literary language; a large corpus dating to the period remains extant. They include histories, chronicles, poetry, theatrical works, Christian canonical works, ethnographic descriptions, and administrative documents. 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. A large body of Nahuatl literature was composed during this period, including the Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume compendium of Aztec culture compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún; Crónica Mexicayotl, a chronicle of the royal lineage of Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc; Cantares Mexicanos, a collection of songs in Nahuatl; a Nahuatl-Spanish/Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary compiled by Alonso de Molina; and the Huei tlamahuiçoltica, a description in Nahuatl of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Grammars and dictionaries of Indigenous languages were composed throughout the colonial period, but their quality was highest in the initial period. The friars found that learning all the Indigenous languages was impossible in practice, so they concentrated on Nahuatl. For a time, the linguistic situation in Mesoamerica remained relatively stable, but in 1696, Charles II of Spain issued a decree banning the use of any language other than Spanish throughout the Spanish Empire. In 1770, another decree, calling for the elimination of the Indigenous languages, did away with Classical Nahuatl as a literary language. Until the end of the Mexican War of Independence in 1821, the Spanish courts admitted Nahuatl testimony and documentation as evidence in lawsuits, with court translators rendering it in Spanish.
For most of the 20th century, Mexican educational policy focused on the Hispanicization of Indigenous communities, teaching only Spanish and discouraging the use of Indigenous languages. As a result, one scholar estimated in 1983 that there was no group of Nahuatl speakers who had attained general literacy (that is, the ability to read the classical language) in Nahuatl, and Nahuatl speakers' literacy rate in Spanish also remained much lower than the national average. Nahuatl is spoken by over 1 million people, with approximately 10% of speakers being monolingual. As a whole, Nahuatl is not considered to be an endangered language; however, during the late 20th century several Nahuatl dialects became extinct.,
The 1990s saw radical changes in Mexican policy concerning Indigenous and linguistic rights. Developments of accords in the international rights arenaSuch as the 1996 adoption at a world linguistics conference in Barcelona of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, a declaration which "became a general reference point for the evolution and discussion of linguistic rights in Mexico" combined with domestic pressures (such as social and political agitation by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and Indigenous social movements) led to legislative reforms and the creation of decentralized government agencies like the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI) and the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (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 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 intercultural bilingual education. Nonetheless, progress towards institutionalizing Nahuatl and securing linguistic rights for its speakers has been slow.
| + 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. |
According to the 2000 census by 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, and women 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, at 24.2% and 22.6%, respectively. 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. According to one study, how often Nahuatl is used is linked to community well-being, partly because it is tied to positive emotions.
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 the State of Mexico, Morelos, and the Federal District, with smaller communities in Michoacán and Durango. Nahuatl became extinct in the states of Jalisco, Colima, Coahuila and Chiapas during the 20th century. As a result of internal migration within the country, Nahuatl speaking communities exist in all states in Mexico. The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States has resulted in the establishment of small Nahuatl speaking communities in the United States, particularly in California, New York, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
| + Classical Nahuatl consonants ! rowspan=2 | ! rowspan=2 scope="col"Labial consonant ! colspan=2 scope="col" | Alveolar ! rowspan=2 scope="col" | Palatal ! colspan=2 scope="col" | Velar consonant ! rowspan=2 scope="col" | Glottal |
| +Classical Nahuatl vowels ! rowspan=2 | ! colspan=2Front vowel ! colspan=2 | Central vowel ! colspan=2 | Back vowel |
In many Nahuatl dialects vowel length contrast is vague, and in others it has become lost entirely. The dialect spoken in Tetelcingo (nhg) developed the vowel length into a difference in quality:Pittman, R. S. (1961). The Phonemes of Tetelcingo (Morelos) Nahuatl. In B. F. Elson & J. Comas (Eds.), A William Cameron Townsend en el vigésimoquinto aniversario del Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (pp. 643–651). Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.
The following verb shows how the verb is marked for subject, patient, object, and indirect object:
In most varieties of Nahuatl, nouns in the unpossessed singular form generally take an absolutive suffix. The most common forms of the absolutive are -tl after vowels, -tli after consonants other than l, and -li after l. Nouns that take the plural usually form the plural by adding one of the plural absolutive suffixes - tin or - meh, but some plural forms are irregular or formed by reduplication. Some nouns have competing plural forms.
Singular noun:
Plural animate noun:
Plural animate noun with reduplication:
Nahuatl distinguishes between possessed and unpossessed forms of nouns. The absolutive suffix is not used on possessed nouns. In all dialects, possessed nouns take a prefix agreeing with number and person of its possessor. Possessed plural nouns take the ending -.
Absolutive noun:
Possessed noun:
Possessed plural:
Nahuatl does not have grammatical case but uses what is sometimes called a relational noun to describe spatial (and other) relations. These cannot appear alone but must occur after a noun or a possessive prefix. They are also often called re Malinche Nahuatl or locative suffixes. Chapter 13 re classical Nahuatl 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:
Use with a preceding noun stem:
Noun compounds are commonly formed by combining two or more nominal stems or combining a nominal stem with an adjectival or verbal stem.
First person plural pronoun in Classical Nahuatl:
First person plural pronouns in Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuat:
Much more common is an honorific/non-honorific distinction, usually applied to second and third persons but not first.
Non-honorific forms:
Honorific forms
Most Nahuatl dialects distinguish three tenses: present, past, and future, and two aspects: perfective and imperfective. Some varieties add progressive or habitual aspects. Many dialects distinguish at least the indicative and imperative moods, and some also have optative and prohibitive moods.
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 are found in many modern dialects. Many Nahuatl varieties also allow forming verbal compounds with two or more verbal roots.
The following verbal form has two verbal roots and is inflected for causative voice and both a direct and indirect object:
Some Nahuatl varieties, notably Classical Nahuatl, can inflect the verb to show the direction of the verbal action going away from or towards the speaker. Some also have specific inflectional categories showing purpose and direction and such complex notions as "to go in order to" or "to come in order to", "go, do and return", "do while going", "do while coming", "do upon arrival", or "go around doing".
Classical Nahuatl and many modern dialects have grammaticalised ways to express politeness towards addressees or even towards people or things that are being mentioned, by using special verb forms and special "honorific suffixes".
Familiar verbal form:
Honorific verbal form:
Michel Launey argues that Classical Nahuatl had a verb-initial basic word order with extensive freedom for variation, which was then used to encode pragmatics functions such as focus and topicality. The same has been argued for some contemporary varieties.
It has been argued, most prominently by the linguist Michel Launey, 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.; . This interpretation aims 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, rather, 'it screams, (the one that) is a child'.,
For example, a construction like the following, with several borrowed words and particles, is common in many modern varieties (Spanish loanwords in boldface):
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 Nahuatl, the postposition - ka meaning 'with' appears used as a preposition, with no preceding object:
In this example from Mexicanero Nahuatl, of Durango, the original postposition/relational noun - pin 'in/on' is used as a preposition. Also, porque, a conjunction borrowed from Spanish, occurs in the sentence.
Many dialects have also undergone a degree of simplification of their morphology that has caused some scholars to consider them to have ceased to be polysynthetic.
For instance, in English, two of the most prominent are undoubtedly chocolateWhile there is no real doubt that the word chocolate comes from Nahuatl, the commonly given Nahuatl etymology 'bitter water' no longer seems to be tenable. suggest the correct etymology to be – a word found in several modern Nahuatl dialects. and tomato (from Nahuatl tōmatl). Other common words are coyote (from Nahuatl coyōtl), avocado (from Nahuatl āhuacatl) and chili pepper (from Nahuatl chilli). The word chicle is also derived from Nahuatl tzictli 'sticky stuff, chicle'. Some other English words from Nahuatl are: Aztec (from aztēcatl); cocoa bean (from Nahuatl cacahuatl 'shell, rind'); ocelot (from ocēlotl). 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 Mēxihco), Guatemala (from Cuauhtēmallān), and Nicaragua (from Nicānāhuac).The Mexica used the word for the Kaqchikel people capital Iximche in central Guatemala, but the word was extended to the entire zone in colonial times; see .
However, epigrapher Alfonso Lacadena has argued that by the eve of the Spanish invasion, one school of Nahua scribes, those of Tetzcoco, had developed a fully syllabic script which could represent spoken language phonetically in the same way that the Maya script did. Some other epigraphers have questioned the claim, arguing that although the syllabicity was clearly extant in some early colonial manuscripts (hardly any pre-Columbian manuscripts have survived), this could be interpreted as a local innovation inspired by Spanish literacy rather than a continuation of a pre-Columbian practice.
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, building on the insights of another Jesuit in Antonio del Rincon. Carochi's orthography used two different diacritics: a macron to represent long vowels and a grave accent for the saltillo, and sometimes an acute accent for short vowels. This orthography did not achieve a wide following outside of the Jesuit community.
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. Several practical orthographies were developed to transcribe the language, many using the Americanist transcription system. With the establishment of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas in 2004, new attempts to create standardized orthographies for the different dialects were resumed; however to this day there is no single official orthography for Nahuatl. Apart from dialectal differences, major issues in transcribing Nahuatl include:
| +Nahuatl Orthographies !Analytic/Hasler/Aztec Congress !Carochi/Andrews !SEP/SIL !Carochi/Launey !Colonial !Intuitive | |||||
| w | hu-/-uh | u | hu-/-uh | hu, uh, o, u | gua/guo/güe/ güi, -uh, u |
| k | qui/que, ca/co | k, qui/que/ca/co | qui/que, ca/co | qui/que, ca/co | k, qu |
| s | ci/ce/za/zo | s | ci/ce/za/zo | ci/ce/za/zo, ç | s, z, c |
| h/' | h | j, ' | é, ê | - | j, h |
| x | x | x | x | x, s | x, sh |
| - | ē | ee/- | ē | - | - |
Nahuatl tlahtolli prose has been preserved in different forms. Annals and chronicles recount history, normally written from the perspective of a particular altepetl (local polity) and often combining mythical accounts with real events. Important works in this genre include those from Chalco written by Chimalpahin, from Tlaxcala by Diego Muñoz Camargo, from Mexico-Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and those of Texcoco by Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl. Many annals recount history year-by-year and are normally written by anonymous authors. These works are sometimes evidently based on pre-Columbian pictorial year counts that existed, such as the Cuauhtitlan annals and the Anales de Tlatelolco. Purely mythological narratives are also found, like the "Legend of the Five Suns", the Aztec creation myth recounted in Codex Chimalpopoca.
One of the most important works of prose written in Nahuatl is the twelve-volume compilation generally known as the Florentine Codex, authored in the mid-16th century by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún and a number of Nahua speakers. With this work Sahagún bestowed an enormous ethnographic description of the Nahua, written in side-by-side translations of Nahuatl and Spanish and illustrated throughout by color plates drawn by Indigenous painters. Its volumes cover a diverse range of topics: Aztec history, material culture, social organization, religious and ceremonial life, rhetorical style and metaphors. The twelfth volume provides an Indigenous perspective on the conquest. Sahagún also made a point of trying to document the richness of the Nahuatl language, stating:
Nahuatl poetry is principally preserved in two sources: the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los señores de Nueva España, both collections of Aztec songs written down in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some songs may have been preserved through oral tradition from pre-conquest times until the time of their writing, for example the songs attributed to the poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl. Karttunen and Lockhart identify more than four distinct styles of songs, e.g. the icnocuicatl ('sad song'), the xopancuicatl ('song of spring'), melahuaccuicatl ('plain song') and yaocuicatl ('song of war'), each with distinct stylistic traits. Aztec poetry makes rich use of metaphoric imagery and themes and are lamentation of the brevity of human existence, the celebration of valiant warriors who die in battle, and the appreciation of the beauty of life.
Another kind of parallelism used is referred to by modern linguists as difrasismo, in which two phrases are symbolically combined to give a metaphorical reading. Classical Nahuatl was rich in such diphrasal metaphors, many of which are explicated by Sahagún in the Florentine Codex and by Andrés de Olmos in his Arte. Such difrasismos include:Examples given are from Sahagún 1950–82, vol. VI, ff. 202V-211V
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