#Aztec glyphs full#

Unlike the Maya, the Nahua did not have a full alphabet. Animate and inanimate nouns may have different plural endings in some dialects. Dialects of Nahuatl also distinguish between possessed and unpossessed nouns. Nahuatl does not have case or gender, but it does distinguish between inanimate and animate nouns. The meaning of a sentence will often be indicated more with prefixes and suffixes on a word than with separate words.

It is highly agglutinative (using complex words consisting of many elements) and polysynthetic. Nahuatl languages have a complex grammar. The dialects of Nahuatl within the Valley of Mexico most closely resemble Classical Nahuatl. The variety within Nahuatl is great enough that it can be divided into western and eastern variants. Nahuatl has many different dialects, not all of which are mutually intelligible. The branch of Uto-Aztecan which includes Nahuatl is Southern Uto-Aztecan. The Uto-Aztecan family also includes languages such as the Shoshoni language spoken in the American west. Nahuatl is part of the Uto-Aztecan language family, a family of languages spoken in the western United States and Mexico. What is Nahuatl?Ĭlassical Nahuatl was the lingua franca, the common language of all the differing peoples that came together under the Aztec civilization. It also has become a language that has helped to strengthen the identity of the Nahua people. In regions with large indigenous Nahua populations, it enjoys a status equivalent to Spanish. Despite colonization by the Spaniards, Nahuatl remains a spoken language with numerous dialects and currently 1.6 million speakers. There was a time, however, when Nahuatl, a language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico, was the language of art, science, religion, and high culture in the part of Mesoamerica ruled by the Aztec Empire.

Today, Spanish is the dominant language of Mexico and most central and South American countries.