náhuatl

Nāhuatl, or Nahuatl, refers to a family of related indigenous languages in the Uto-Aztecan stock, spoken by Nahua communities primarily in central and southern Mexico and, to a lesser extent, in parts of Central America. The best-known varieties are the Central Mexican Nahuatl dialects. Historically, Nahuatl was the lingua franca of the Aztec empire and played a major role in the early colonial period in central Mexico. Classical Nahuatl, the form used in 16th-century documents such as the Florentine Codex, remains a central resource for linguists and historians.

Náhuatl languages are generally agglutinative, with complex verbal morphology that marks subject, object, tense, aspect, and mood, and with noun phrases that can show possession and number. They employ a Latin-based writing system today; orthography varies by community but commonly uses digraphs such as tl and hu, and preserves the glottal stop. Classic texts and modern grammars reveal substantial dialectal diversity and varying degrees of mutual intelligibility between varieties.

Today there are roughly one to two million speakers, with most concentrated in Mexican states such as Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, Guerrero, México State, Tlaxcala, and Morelos. Some varieties are endangered, while others are used in education, media, and everyday communication. Nāhuatl has contributed many words to Spanish and other languages, including tomato, chocolate, avocado, cacao, and chile. In Mexico, Nahuatl is recognized as a national language and is the subject of revitalization and documentation efforts by communities, universities, and government programs.