Nahuatl dialects

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[edit] Nahuatl dialects and dialect groupings

The Uto Aztecan Nahuatl language can be grouped into two rough dialect continua, labelled the central and the peripheral dialects.

The nucleus of the central area is the valley of Mexico, where the Aztec empire was founded and where it expanded from. Classical Nahuatl, the enormously influential language spoken by the people of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was one of the central dialects, as are the dialects spoken in that area today. The central dialect area also includes variants spoken in Morelos, Estado de Mexico, Southern Hidalgo, Northwest Puebla, Tlaxcala, and (perhaps) Southeastern Puebla and the Orizaba-Zongolica region of Veracruz. The central dialects are generally considered to have been relatively innovative.

The Peripheral dialects are spoken in areas more distant from the center of the Aztec empire. There is much diversity within the peripheral dialects and various subdivisions among them have been proposed. Peripheral dialects are spoken in Durango, La Huasteca, Guerrero, Tabasco, Veracruz, and the southern Pacific coast as far away as El Salvador.

In her article "Nahuatl dialectology: A survey and some suggestions" (IJAL 54.1. 28-72.) Una Canger summarises research in Nahuatl Dialectology and suggests some diagnostic traits serving to establish central and peripheral dialect continua. Her suggested classification is supported, in general outline, by the enormous dialectological survey conducted by Yolanda Lastra de Suárez, published (1986: UNAM) as "Las Áreas Dialectales del Náhuatl Moderno". Lastra subdivides the Peripheral dialects into an eastern, a western and a La Huasteca area. Her classification stands as the most accepted to this day.

Lastra's detailed classification is as follows:

  • Western periphery
    • West coast
    • Western Mexico state
    • Durango-Nayarit
  • Eastern Periphery
  • Huasteca
  • Center
    • Nuclear sub-area
    • Puebla-Tlaxcala
    • Xochiltepec-Huatlatlauca
    • Southeastern Puebla
    • Central Guerrero
    • Southern Guerrero

All these dialectal areas constitute what may be called General Aztec or Nahuatl proper: it is generally accepted that Pochutec (now extinct) is different enough from all of these to warrant being counted as a sister Nahuan language to General Aztec.

[edit] Difficulties of classification

The dialectal situation is very complex and most categorizations, including the one presented above, are, in the nature of things, controversial. Lastra herself says, for instance, that "The isoglosses rarely coincide. As a result, one can give greater or lesser importance to a feature and make the [dialectal] division that one judges appropriate/convenient" (1986:189). And after giving the above classification, she immediately makes the caveat: "We insist that this classification is not [entirely] satisfactory" (1986:190).

An early attempt to classify the Nahuan dialects was made by Juan Hasler, on the basis of the variance of the phoneme which in Classical Nahuatl and many other dialects is /tɬ/, in some eastern and southern dialects is /t/, and in a few dialects /l/. He assumed that since the /tɬ/ had been shown by Benjamin Lee Whorf to be derived from proto Uto-Aztecan */ta/ that the group of /t/ dialects were conservative and the /tɬ/ and /l/ dialects more innovative. However, it was later established that at least some t-dialects had also undergone the */ta/>/tɬ/ change and had later changed /tɬ/ back to /t/ in some positions. Hasler's "tetradialectology" is now considered less than fully useful because it is based on this one sole trait, which does not coincide usefully with other isoglosses, and because the crucial assumption which gave that trait extra significance has been contradicted.

Some of the isoglosses used by Canger to establish the Peripheral vs. Central dialectal dichotomy are these:

Central Peripheral
#e- initial vowel e #ye- epenthetic y before initial e
mochi "all" nochi "all"
totoltetl "egg" teksistli "egg"
tesi "to grind" tisi "to grind"
-h/ʔ plural subject suffix -lo plural subject suffix
-tin preferred noun plural -meh preferred noun plural
o- past augment - absence of augment
-nki/-wki "perfect participle forms" -nik/-wik "perfect participle forms"
tliltik "black" yayawik "black"
-ki agentive suffix -ketl/-katl agentive suffix

None of these isoglosses is without its problems, of course. For instance, Tetelcingo Nahuatl, a rather solidly nuclear Central dialect, has ye- and nochi, has neither h nor ʔ nor -lo for marking plurals (but presumably had and lost h), uses (reflexes of) both -meh and -tin, uses the past augment optionally, has both -nki/-wki and -nik/-wik, and uses neither tliltik nor yayawik. On the other three isoglosses, it is solidly Central, however!

[edit] Intelligibility

The differences among the dialects are not trivial, and in many cases result in very low intelligibility: people who speak one dialect cannot understand or be understood by those from another. Thus by many people’s criteria they would be considered different languages. The ISO divisions referenced below respond to intelligibility more than to historical or reconstructional considerations. Like the higher-level groupings, they also are not self-evident, and are subject to considerable controversy.

Nevertheless these variants all are clearly related, and more closely related to each other than to Pochutec, and they and Pochutec are more closely related to each other than to any other Uto-Aztecan languages (such as Cora or Huichol, Tepehuán and Tarahumara, Yaqui/Mayo, etc.)

[edit] See Also

[edit] Bibliography

  • BOAS, Franz. 1917. El dialecto mexicano de Pochutla, Oaxaca. IJAL 1. 9-44.
  • CAMPBELL, Lyle. n.d. La dialectología pipil. Ms. : .
  • CANGER, Una and DAKIN, Karen. 1985. An inconspicuous basic split in Nahuatl. IJAL 51. 358-361.
  • CANGER, Una. 1980. Five studies inspired by Nahuatl verbs in -oa. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 19. Copenhagen:
  • CANGER, Una. 1988. Nahuatl dialectology: A survey and some suggestions. IJAL 54.1. 28-72.
  • CANGER, Una. 1988. Subgrupos de los dialectos nahuas. Smoke and Mist: Mesoamerican Studies in Memory of Thelma D. Sullivan. Ed. by J. Kathryn Josserand and Karen Dakin, eds.. 473-498. Oxford: BAR International Series 402. Part ii.
  • DAKIN, Karen and RYESKY, Diana. 1990. Morelos Nahuatl Dialects: Hypotheses on their historical divisions. Morelos en una economia global. Proceedings of the Congress in Cocoyoc, Morelos, November 19023, 1989. Submitted in January, 1990.
  • DAKIN, Karen, and SULLIVAN, Thelma D. 1980. Dialectología del náhuatl de los siglos XVI y XVI. Rutas de intercambio en Mesoamérica y el Norte de Mexico, XVI Round Table, Saltillo, September 9-15, 1979. V. II. 291-297.
  • DAKIN, Karen. 1974. Dialectología nahuatl de Morelos: Un estudio preliminar. Estudios de cultura náhuatl 11. 227-234.
  • HASLER, Juan. 1961. Tetradialectología nahua. A William Cameron Townsend en el Vigesimoquinto Aniversario del Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. 455-464. Mexico: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.
  • HASLER, Juan. 1975. Los dialectos de la lengua nahua. América Indígena 35. 170-188. : .
  • HASLER, Juan. 1955. Los cuatro dialectos de la lengua nahua. Revista mexicana de estudios antropológicos xiv, 1a parte. 149-152.
  • LASTRA DE SUAREZ, Yolanda. 1979. Nahuatl dialect areas. Presentation to the Friends of Uto-Aztecan Working Conference, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, June 22, Mexico
  • LASTRA DE SUAREZ, Yolanda. 1981. Stress in modern Nahuatl dialects. Nahuatl Studies in Memory of Fernando Horcasitas, Texas Linguistic Forum 18.1. 19-128. Austin: The University of Texas, Department of Linguistics.
  • LASTRA DE SUAREZ, Yolanda. 1986. Las áreas dialectales del náhuatl moderno. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
  • WHORF, Benjamin L. 1937. The origin of Aztec tl. American Anthropologist 39. 265-274.

[edit] List of Nahuatl Dialects

The three-letter (ISO 639-3) code, with a link to the corresponding Ethnologue entry, is given after each dialect name. Where there is an SIL-MX Nahuatl subsite for that variant, a link is given to that subsite.

  • Central Nahuatl (nhn)
  • Central Huasteca Nahuatl (nch)
  • Central Puebla (ncx)
  • Coatepec Nahuatl (naz)
  • Durango Nahuatl (nln)
  • Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl (nhe)
  • Guerrero Nahuatl (ngu) (SIL-MX)
  • Highland Puebla Nahuatl (azz)
  • Huaxcaleca Nahuatl (nhq)
  • Isthmus-Cosoleacaque Nahuatl (nhk)
  • Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl (nhx) (SIL-MX)
  • Isthmus-Pajapan Nahuatl (nhp)
  • Michoacán Nahuatl (ncl)
  • Morelos Nahuatl (nhm) (SIL-MX)
  • Northern Oaxaca Nahuatl (nhy) (SIL-MX)
  • Northern Puebla Nahuatl (ncj)
  • Ometepec Nahuatl (nht)
  • Orizaba Nahuatl (nlv) (SIL-MX)
  • Pipil (ppl)
  • Santa María la Alta Nahuatl (nhz)
  • Southeastern Puebla Nahuatl (nhs)
  • Tabasco Nahuatl (extinct) (nhc)
  • Temascaltepec Nahuatl (nhv)
  • Tenango Nahuatl (nhi) (SIL-MX)
  • Tetelcingo Nahuatl (nhg) (SIL-MX)
  • Tlalitzlipa Nahuatl (nhj)
  • Tlamacazapa Nahuatl (nuz)
  • Western Huasteca Nahuatl (nhw)

List II. Nahuan subgroup members, sorted by number of speakers: (name [ISO subgroup code] – location(s) ~approx. number of speakers)

  • Eastern Huasteca [nhe] – Hidalgo, Western Veracruz, Northern Puebla ~450,000
  • Western Huasteca [nhw] – San Luis Potosí, Western Hidalgo ~450,000
  • Guerrero [ngu] – Guerrero ~200,000
  • Orizaba [nlv] – Central Veracruz ~140,000
  • Southeastern Puebla [nhs] – Southeast Puebla ~135,000
  • Highland Puebla [azz] – Puebla Highlands ~125,000
  • Northern Puebla [ncj] – Northern Puebla ~66,000
  • Central [nhn] – Tlaxcala, Puebla ~50,000
  • Isthmus-Mecayapan [nhx] – Southern Veracruz ~20,000
  • Central Puebla [ncx] – Central Puebla ~18,000
  • Morelos [nhm] – Morelos ~15,000
  • Northern Oaxaca [nhy] – Northwestern Oaxaca, Southeastern Puebla ~10,000
  • Huaxcaleca [nhq] – Puebla ~7,000
  • Isthmus-Pajapan [nhp] – Southern Veracruz ~7,000
  • Isthmus-Cosoleacaque [nhk] – Northwestern Coastal Chiapas, Southern Veracruz ~5,500
  • Tetelcingo [nhg] – Morelos ~3,500
  • Michoacán [ncl] – Michoacán ~3,000
  • Santa María de la Alta [nhz] – Northwest Puebla ~3,000
  • Tenango [nhi] – Northern Puebla ~2,000
  • Tlamacazapa [nuz] – Morelos ~1,500
  • Coatepec [naz] – Southwestern México (State), Northwestern Guerrero ~1,500
  • Durango [nln] – Southern Durango ~1,000
  • Ometepec [nht] – Southern Guerrero, Western Oaxaca ~500
  • Temascaltepec [nhv] – Southwestern México (State) ~300
  • Tlalitzlipa [nhj] – Puebla ~100
  • Pipil [ppl] – El Salvador ~100
  • Tabasco [nhc] – Tabasco
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