Nhuatl

Nhuatl, also spelled Nahuatl, is a group of closely related indigenous languages in the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken by the Nahua people in central and eastern Mexico, with dialects ranging from mutually intelligible varieties to languages that are not mutually intelligible. Estimates of speakers vary, but Nahuatl languages together have about 1.5 to 2 million speakers, primarily in rural areas but increasingly in urban communities as well, across states such as Veracruz, Puebla, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Mexico State, and in the Mexico City area, with smaller communities in neighboring regions.

Historically, Nahuatl is notable for Classical Nahuatl, which served as the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire and a major language of early colonial documentation. Today it continues to be used in education, media, literature, and daily life, and many communities maintain bilingual programs with Spanish. The language is highly diverse, with dialect continua that some scholars classify as separate languages within the Nahuatl family.

Nhuatl varieties are characterized by agglutinative morphology, employing prefixes and suffixes to indicate person, number, tense, aspect, and mood, and features such as noun incorporation and a rich verbal system. The writing system uses the Latin script, and there are several standardized orthographies developed by Mexican linguistic authorities. Common Nahuatl phonemes are represented with digraphs such as tl, ch, hu, and cz, with diacritics used in some orthographies to indicate vowel quality and stress.

The status of Nhuatl is that of a recognized Indigenous language with numerous active speaker communities and ongoing revitalization and documentation efforts, though vitality varies by region and dialect.