Nahuatl and its Speakers across Time

The first study of language change and evolution in a major Indigenous North American language (Nahuatl) across five centuries.

By studying language change and evolution in Nahuatl across five centuries, this book fills a huge gap in the field concerning the history of Indigenous languages and speakers in the conditions of long-term culture contact, colonization, and assimilation pressures. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.Drawing on an extensive source base spanning five hundred years, from the first half of the sixteenth century to the present, this is the first comprehensive, data-driven study of both historical and modern varieties of Nahuatl, a major Indigenous language spoken in North America. Employing multidisciplinary methods and a diachronic perspective, it identifies the key social, cultural, and linguistic factors that have interacted to motivate language change and the evolution of the social and cultural ecologies of the Indigenous communities in today's multilingual and multiethnic Mexico. It provides a critical enrichment of Western theories of contact-induced language change, continuity, acculturation, and resilience, paving the way for new relational methods of studying these complex phenomena across time and space. It is essential reading for researchers in contact linguistics, historical and synchronic sociolinguistics, Hispanic and Latin American studies, and linguistic typology. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.