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Nahuatl is a language spoken in south-central Mexico. It was the administrative language of the Aztec empire, and accordingly was of great interest to the Spanish immigrants who later inherited the administration of Mexico. The kind of Nahuatl respresented in early Colonial texts is referred to as "Classical," in contrast to Nahuatl as it has been spoken in more recent times.
Because a knowledge Nahuatl was so important to the early Spanish, it was an object of scholarly concern already by the mid-XVIth century. Accordingly we have a long record of it, and in some ways this makes it one of the most interesting of the indigenous American languages to study. Indeed Nahuatl can become a consuming passion.
Although there are still speakers of Nahuatl, it is probably safe to say that all but the most elderly among them are bilingual in Spanish, and in general, later Nahuatl shows influence of Spanish as well as a continuing evolution of trends that were already going on in early Nahuatl. (Click here for historian John Schmal's informative page about continuities in the use of Nahuatl in Mexico.)
Because the spelling of Nahuatl was originally based on spelling conventions in Spanish, Nahuatl texts are generally "pronounced like Spanish," with the following exceptions and points to note:
However over the centuries there has been considerable instability in the spelling of Nahuatl. Some common variations:
In this century American linguists working with modern Nahuatl have sometimes preferred spellings that look less Spanish (and "coincidentally" more English). Thus:
*-Weird letters are an occupational hazard of being a linguist. Ordinary mortals find them hard to understand and harder yet to type.
The background design is patterned on the famous "Coyolxauhqui Stone," a magnificent bas-relief found at the foot of Huitzilopochtli's pyramid at the Templo Mayor in Mexico city. It represents the dismembered goddess, hacked to bits by her brother.