Pre-Columbian period On the issue of geographic origin, the consensus of linguists during the 20th century was that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in the southwestern United States. Evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory supports the thesis of a southward diffusion across the North American continent, specifically that speakers of early Nahuan languages migrated from
Aridoamerica 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. 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 and
Huichol 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 speakers of Nahuatl, 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,
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
relational nouns and
calques 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. 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 Nahuatl speakers 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.
Colonial period With the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, Nahuatl was displaced as the dominant regional language, but remained important in Nahua communities under Spanish rule. Nahuatl was documented extensively during the colonial period in
Tlaxcala, Cuernavaca, Culhuacan, Coyoacan, Toluca and other locations in the Valley of Mexico and beyond. In the 1970s, scholars of Mesoamerican
ethnohistory have analyzed local-level texts in Nahuatl and other Indigenous languages to gain insight into cultural change in the colonial era via linguistic changes, known at present as the
New Philology. Several of these texts have been translated and published either in part or in their entirety. The types of documentation include censuses, especially one early set from the Cuernavaca region, town council records from Tlaxcala, as well as the testimony of Nahua individuals. 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.
Pedro de Alvarado conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec allies, who then settled outside of modern
Antigua Guatemala. '', featuring Nahuatl written using the Latin alphabet As a part of their efforts, missionaries belonging to several
religious orders—principally
Jesuits, as well as
Franciscan and
Dominican 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
grammars 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; '
, a chronicle of the royal lineage of Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc; ', a collection of songs in Nahuatl; a Nahuatl-Spanish/Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary compiled by
Alonso de Molina; and the '''', 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. The 1990s saw radical changes in Mexican policy concerning Indigenous and linguistic rights. Developments of accords in the international rights arena 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 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
intercultural bilingual education. Nonetheless, progress towards institutionalizing Nahuatl and securing linguistic rights for its speakers has been slow. == Demography and distribution ==