Nahuatl–Spanish contact
Nahuatl has been in intense contact with Spanish since the Spanish conquest of 1521. Since that time, there have been a large number of Spanish loanwords introduced to the language, loans which span from nouns and verbs to adjectives and particles. Syntactical constructions have also been borrowed into Nahuatl from Spanish, through which the latter language has exerted typological pressure on the form such that Nahuatl and Spanish are exhibiting syntactic and typological convergence. Today, hardly any Nahuatl monolinguals remain, and the language has undergone extreme shift to Spanish, such that some consider it be on the way to extinction. The Nahuatl and Spanish languages have coexisted in stable contact for over 500 years in central Mexico. This long, well-documented period of contact provides some of the best linguistic evidence for contact-induced grammatical change. That is to say, Spanish seems to have exerted a profound influence on the Nahuatl language, but despite the extreme duration of their contact Nahuatl has only recently begun to show signs of language shift. This shift is progressing at a startling rate. Though Nahuatl still has over a million speakers, it is considered by some linguists to be endangered and on the way to extinction. As with regional languages the world over, Nahuatl finds itself being replaced by a ‘world’ language, Spanish, as other small linguistic communities have shifted to languages like English and Chinese. The world's loss in linguistic diversity can be tied to its changing economic and political conditions, as the model of industrial capitalism under a culturally homogenizing nation state spread throughout the world and culture becomes more and more global rather than regional. However, we do not always know exactly why some local or ‘traditional’ languages are clung to and preserved while others vanish much more quickly. Contact history Spanish conquest Contact in earnest between the two languages began along with the beginning of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519. Prior to that, Nahuatl existed as the dominant language of much of central, southern, and western Mexico, the language of the dominant Aztec culture and Mexica ethnic group. Though the Spanish tried to eradicate much of Mexica culture after their defeat of the Mexica Aztec in their capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521, Aztec culture and the Nahuatl language were spread among a variety of ethnic groups in Mexico, some of whom, like the Tlaxcala, were instrumental allies of the Spanish in their defeat of the Aztec empire. Since a large part of the surviving indigenous population, whom the Spanish hoped to Christianize and assimilate, were part of the now fragmented Aztec culture and thus speakers of Nahuatl, the Spanish missionaries recognized that they would continue to need the help of their Nahuatl speaking indigenous allies, and allowed them some relative autonomy in exchange for their help in conquering and Christianizing the remainder of the territory, in parts of which indigenous populations remained hostile throughout the 16th century. In this way, friendly Nahuatl speaking communities were valuable in their role as