Introduction
Nahuatl refers to a language, or sometimes a broader name for a group of closely related languages, of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Most well-known for being the language of the Aztec and Toltec civilizations, Nahuatl represented a linguistic and cultural commonality between the diverse ethnic groups spanning pre-colonial Latin America. Today, Nahuatl is mainly spoken in the central and western states of Mexico, in which around 30 dialectal variants exist. However, with the increase in urbanization and standardization in modern-day Mexico, Nahuatl has become an endangered language despite being the most prevalent indigenous language in Mexico.
Structure of Nahuatl
Although Nahuatl’s highly agglutinative structure presents learning difficulties for those more accustomed to languages such as Spanish or English, it also offers a diverse and rich means for expression. In agglutinative languages, words are composed of a sequence of morphemes (meaningful word elements such as roots, stems, affixes, etc), in which each morpheme corresponds to only one grammatical category. For example, the word nikíta can be broken down in the following manner:
Morphemes: [ni-kí-ta]
Meaning: [I-it-see]
Overall: I see it.
While the above translations of the morphemes “ni,” “kí,” and “ta” oversimplify their actual grammatical meaning, this example mainly serves to demonstrate the one-to-one correspondence of morpheme to distinct grammatical meaning in Nahuatl.
Additionally, there is an 18-syllable word in Mösiehualii (Tetelcingo Nahuatl):
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nehualmoyecastemojmolunijtzinutinemisquiöni,
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which means “you honorable people might have come along banging your noses so as to make them bleed, but in fact, you didn’t.”