Nahuas and Spaniards in contact: Cross-cultural transfer as seen through the Nahuatl lexicon

Abstract

Due to a large corpus of written sources, the history of the ancestors of modern Nahuas, the speakers of the Nahuatl language, is one of the best documented as compared with other indigenous groups of the Americas. Given that a significant part of these sources was written in Nahuatl over a long period of time, they provide an excellent opportunity for studying the history of its speakers through their own language and for studying the language itself. A fascinating part of this story involves the prolonged culture and language contact with Spaniards and its shortand long-term consequences in all spheres of life. The history of contact shows how Nahuatl was the tool, the medium, and the catalyzer of cross-cultural transfers, both transforming and being transformed by reality. The ‘Nahua world’ has always been multiethnic and multilingual. At the time of the conquest, the speakers of its many variants coexisted with speakers of many other indigenous languages in the Mesoamerican ‘melting pot’, more than 100 of which survive today (the number varies, depending on forms of classification). However, the ‘game-changer’ in the history of the Nahuatl language and the Nahuas has been the speakers of Spanish themselves, both in the colonial period and at the present time.