Nahuatl is a Native American language spoken in Mexico and the US. It was historically spoken by the Aztecs and is the most widely spoken native language in North America. Classical Nahuatl was used as a lingua franca before European conquest. The language has loanwords in Spanish and English.
Nahuatl is a group of Native American languages and dialects spoken in modern-day Mexico. There are also small Nahuatl-speaking immigrant communities in the United States, particularly in New York and California. This language is best known as the historical language of the Aztecs, but the form of the language they spoke is more accurately referred to as Classical Nahuatl. There are over 1.5 million speakers and it is the most widely spoken native language in North America. The language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language family, which includes over 60 languages and spans a geographic area that includes not only Mexico, but also the modern United States of Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. Most, though not all, of the people who speak it also speak Spanish.
While the Aztecs are the most famous speakers of Nahuatl, they weren’t the first. Earlier tribes spoke different dialects of the language, and different dialects persisted among different tribes during the time of the Aztec empire. However, due to the extensive power wielded by the Aztecs at the height of the empire, Classical Nahuatl became the most widely spoken version and was used as a lingua franca throughout Mexico and other Mesoamerican countries prior to the European conquest. It is also the first most documented dialect of the language, as there are numerous written records and translations from the colonial period.
Before the conquest, the Aztecs used a rudimentary writing system consisting mainly of pictograms and ideograms. It did not represent the language verbatim, but was mainly used to keep short records or the basic ideas of a text that would be fleshed out in the narrative. The large body of Aztec literature transcribed in the Roman alphabet after the conquest was memorized in pre-colonial times. There was also a phonetic syllabary before the arrival of Europeans, but it was cumbersome and rarely used. Today, the Roman orthography developed in the colonial period is still used to write the various dialects of Nahuatl, but its use is not standardized and spelling inconsistencies can be found between sources, a problem that is also present in classical texts. There continues to be controversy over spelling in Nahuatl.
Spanish and many other languages feature Nahuatl loanwords, and many have entered English via Spanish. Some familiar English words derived from the language are avocado, chili, chocolate, coyote, and tomato.
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