Historical Context
In 1519, the Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortés and led an expedition that led to the fall of the Aztec Empire, bringing much of what is now known as mainland Mexico under Spanish rule. In the years following, Spain’s colonization efforts saw the establishment of economic systems that extracted natural resources and labor from Mesoamerican communities.
Even as Spanish colonizers systematically integrated indigenous laborers into the overall economy, for the most part, indigenous speakers were allowed to maintain usage of their language. As destructive as colonialism was for some aspects of Nahua culture, the Spanish colonizers actually contributed to the preservation of other aspects. In particular, the Catholic Church has published Nahuatl dictionaries and translated works such as the Mesoamerican codices, in part to gain the trust of the indigenous people and understanding of their culture to convert them to Christianity. Overall, it can be concluded that syncretism between these two languages was inevitable.
More in-depth look into Nahatul's honorific system and its reflection of varying social hierarchies.
Changes to Spanish
In spite of Spanish being the language of power, inevitably, contact with Nahuatl has resulted in linguistic and cultural changes that persist in Spanish spoken in Mexico today. For instance, the use of diminutives in Mexico such as -ito/ita may have been inherited from Nahuatl diminutives such as -tzin, which is discussed in more detail in the previous section. Moreover, Spanish has many lexical borrowings — which is the adoption of individual words or even large sets of vocabulary items from another language or dialect — taken from Nahuatl that are used worldwide today, some examples of which are listed below. Of course, borrowing words from Nahuatl required phonetic and morphological adaptations to conform to the standards of Spanish. As such, the original Nahuatl words were similar yet different.
Avocado (Ahuacatl)
Cacao (Cacahuatl)
Chili (Chilli)
Chocolate (Xocolātl/Chocolātl)
Tomato (Tomatl)
Changes to Nahuatl
This section summarizes and cites information from “Language Encounters: Toward a Better Comprehension of Contact-Induced Lexical Change in Colonial Nahuatl” by Justyna Olko.
Similar to Nahuatl's impact on Spanish, Spanish had influenced Nahuatl as well. In her article “Language Encounters: Toward a Better Comprehension of Contact-Induced Lexical Change in Colonial Nahuatl,” Justyna Olko describes a scheme created by James Lockhart for demonstrating the process of language syncretism between Nahuatl and Spanish.
Beginning with the creation of neologisms, descriptions, and extensions of meaning, proceeding through an increasing borrowing of nouns, and culminating in the borrowing of verbs and particles as well as phonetic and syntactic assimilations, Lockhart’s scheme reflects successive reactions to culture contact, marking an ongoing transformation...
In Lockhart’s Stage 1, extending from the arrival of the Spaniards to ca. 1540 -1550, Nahuatl remained almost unaffected. The Nahuas relied on the resources of their own language to describe the new, resorting to neologisms or extensions of meaning. During Stage 2, dating approximately from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the language underwent few changes in terms of morphology, syntax, and phonology despite the widespread borrowing of Spanish nouns. In Stage 3, which begins in the mid-seventeenth century and continues to the present in communities where Nahuatl is still spoken, many simultaneous changes took place, including the borrowing of verbs and particles, the adoption of plural forms and sounds missing earlier in Nahuatl, and the creation of equivalence relationships. Contrary to earlier stages, introductions were no longer motivated solely by new objects and concepts, but by linguistic differences between Spanish and Nahuatl, The fourth, partly overlapping stage refers to the use of a heavily Nahuatlized version of Spanish, corresponding with the notion of interference through shift or imposition" (37-38).
Neologisms
In the context of the colonial era, neologisms are words
created to name a new concept or object but without imitating a Spanish word. Neologisms are often produced by combining existing words or by giving words new suffixes or prefixes. This classification is often limited to those expressions that are in the process of entering language but have not yet become part of its standardized vocabulary. It has been observed that resorting to neologisms was probably the most typical and widespread language reaction in the first phase of contact when the Nahuas relied mainly on the resources of their own language and borrowing was rare (39).
Examples of neologisms during this era:
Meaning Changes
Meaning changes are, as the phrase implies, changes in meaning to preexisting Nahuatl words to describe new concepts or objects.
Meaning change can take three basic forms depending on whether a given term adds new referents, reduces them, or changes its basic referent, corresponding to the extension of meaning, narrowing, and shift. The latter case seems much more problematic, for it is often difficult to prove that a complete replacement took place on a larger scale, but it may well be the case of a particular speaker. Extensions of meaning based on adding new referents were very common and inevitable whenever functions, appearances or meanings of Nahuatl and Spanish objects and concepts were close enough (42).
Examples of meaning changes during this era:
Lexical Borrowings
Lexical borrowings in Nahuatl are the adoption of individual words or even large sets of vocabulary items from Spanish. Then, “once a loan was incorporated, it underwent phonetic and morphological adaptations according to the rules of Nahuatl.”
Loanwords, once incorporated into Nahuatl, were subject to numerous derivational processes, often leading to new lexical categories and grammatical functions. For example, traditional suffixes were commonly employed to form abstract or collective nouns (teniente, “deputy,” becoming tenienteyotl meaning “the office of a deputy”) or denominal verbs (firma, “a signature” leading to firmatia, “to sign”; sabadoti, “to be Saturday” from sábado, “Saturday”), among a very rich pool of possibilities (46).
Examples of lexical borrowings during this era:
Variance in Honorifics Usages
This section summarizes and cites information from “Grammar, Dialectal Variation, and Honorific Registers in Nahuatl in Seventeenth Century Guatemala” by Sergio Romero.
In the article “Grammar, Dialectal Variation, and Honorific Registers in Nahuatl in Seventeenth Century Guatemala” by Sergio Romero, during the 17th century the variation in the grammars of honorific registers in Central Mexican and Guatemalan Nahuatl varieties provides a glimpse into each society’s social hierarchy and cultural ideas. While speakers of Central Mexican Nahuatl were often allied with the Spanish conquistadores, Guatemalan Nahuatl references varieties of Central Nahuatl spoken in Guatemala prior to Spanish contact.
In Nahuatl, the fact that almost every part of speech can be variable marked as honorific makes a gradient indexing of honorific deference possible” (61). Comparing the gradient of deference demonstrated in speech between Guatemalan and Central Mexican Nahuatl, “honorific verbal forms were used with low frequency in Guatemalan Nahuatl” (65). More specifically, “Guatemalan Nahuatl followed different reverential norms involving a sparser use of honorific morphology in discourse” (71).
The Spanish projected onto the Nahua their own language ideologies: nobles speak the language with full propriety, while commoners speak it with a more laconic stylistic repertoire. This recursive projection construes variation in honorific use as iconic of the wealth and the social rank of speakers (Irvine and Gal 2000). Mexico City's Nahuatl was construed as the norm from which Guatemalan Nahuatl deviated, showing an impoverished set of "manners of speaking” (71-72)...
It is hard to assess what the impact of the Spanish invasion was on Guatemalan Nahua attitudes towards central Nahuatl, with which they must have been acquainted before the Spanish conquest. However, it is possible that the close military alliance between Mexicans and Spaniards through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries influenced the social evaluation of Mexican varieties in Guatemala. Central Nahuatl could have been construed as language of conquerors, of indios conquistador (72).