
In Milpa Alta, people still speak Aztec - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180705-in-milpa-alta-people-still-speak-aztec
======
schoen
Nahuatl is spoken by something like 1-2 million people and is probably the
fifth most spoken indigenous language in the Americas

[http://www.native-languages.org/most-spoken.htm](http://www.native-
languages.org/most-spoken.htm)

and the most-spoken in Mexico.

I think the title (and to a slight extent the text of the article) make the
language sound like a rare curiosity but it's actually a major cultural
phenomenon. Grabbing some numbers (which are always subject to definitional
quarrels), I think Nahuatl is as common in Mexico as Tagalog in the U.S. (by
absolute number of speakers) or as Chinese in the U.S. (by proportion of the
population).

Among many other things, our words for tomato, avocado, chili, and chocolate
all derive from Nahuatl.

(Edit: of course the social role of indigenous languages in Mexico is
different from that of Tagalog or Chinese in the U.S., and the main indigenous
languages there are strongly associated with rural and semi-rural communities,
as this article points out... which might mean that city-dwelling Mexicans
might have quite a bit less contact with Nahuatl and Maya languages than city-
dwellers in the U.S. would have with Tagalog or Chinese.)

~~~
gricardo99
I always thought avocado was the Spanish word, and guaca along with guacamole
(guaca + mole meaning sauce) was the indigenous word.

~~~
mkempe
You're right.

Avocado -- mid 17th century: Spanish alteration (influenced by avocado
‘advocate’) of aguacate, from Nahuatl ahuacatl.

Guacamole -- from an Aztec dialect via Nahuatl "āhuaca molli", which
translates to "avocado sauce/concoction".

~~~
schoen
> (influenced by avocado ‘advocate’)

I think you mean "influenced by abogado ‘advocate’".

~~~
jdmichal
Which is pronounced with /β/, a sound closer to /v/ than /b/.

~~~
schoen
I wonder what sound changes led from the Latin pronunciation [adwo] to Spanish
[aβo]. (I'm sure this is well known, just not by me!)

~~~
asveikau
The dropping of /d/ is not surprising. This happens all over the place. Look
at Latin "ad" becoming Spanish "a" for a simple example. (ad like the
preposition built into this very word, ad + vocare)

The classical /w/ from Latin obviously became /v/ in a lot of romance
languages. /b/ and /v/ merging to create [β] I think was particular to Spain
and pretty old. But I think I also read that in many places vulgar Latin /b/
had a [v] allophone, but still distinct from /w/ (orthographic v) which I
guess evolved into /v/ outside Iberia with the old [v] sticking around as /b/.

Here is one of the top google hits from an old saying about this: "beati
hispani quibus vivere bibere est" \--[http://en.antiquitatem.com/felices-
hispani-quibus-vivere-est...](http://en.antiquitatem.com/felices-hispani-
quibus-vivere-est-bibere) \-- this seems to put the b, v merger at the first
century AD and have a lot of quotes about Iberians doing it it from the
~1500s, blaming it on Basques.

By the way, in my amateur opinion the much more head-spinny Iberian sound
change was the creation of modern /x/ in words like "Quijote" or "México". It
would seem that the Spaniards conquered the new world with those things as
[ʃ], transcribed a bunch of Mexican place names with that, then later changed
the sound to [x], and _brought the change back_ to the colonies. It is
interesting to me that such a pronunciation change in relatively isolated
populations can still be held on both sides of an ocean, and not have some
other form just end up as one side's peculiar accent, as occurred with, say
the evolution of the [θ] sound.

------
asveikau
It's also not terribly uncommon to hear indigenous languages of Mexico spoken
in the United States. I am an American who understands Spanish and I've
occasionally recognized this in public, just overhearing people on the street
in certain places.

Sometimes I hear a speaker switch back and forth between some language I can't
recognize and a very recognizable, Mexican-accented Spanish. Or sometimes they
will only code-switch with a few Spanish words here and there.

~~~
schoen
There are a whole bunch of Yucatec Maya speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area
-- reportedly tens of thousands!

~~~
jacobolus
I hear people speaking Tzeltal on a regular basis in San Francisco. (A Maya
language from Chiapas.)

~~~
schoen
One way to recognize Maya languages from Spanish without that much familiarity
with either is that /ʃ/ (English "sh") is a common sound in all Maya languages
but not present in Spanish (except Rioplatense Spanish).

Also Maya languages make a lot of use of ejective consonants like

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_and_alveolar_ejectives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_and_alveolar_ejectives)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_ejective_affricate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_ejective_affricate)

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tasty_freeze
It was disappointing that the article didn't have audio or video so we could
hear what it sounds like.

Youtube offered some some hokey "learn some phrases" videos, but this is a guy
speaking naturally:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTBABGLJzIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTBABGLJzIA)

~~~
schoen
Three people if you watch the whole video!

There's an interesting code-switching thing for two of them (especially the
last speaker) where Spanish "este" ('this') is used apparently at the
beginning or end of new thoughts or to relate ideas to each other, including
"para este"/"para" ('for this') when describing a reason for something and
"pero este" ('but this') when drawing a contrast. I don't think this is quite
idiomatic in Spanish when used this way, and I wonder if these are
translations of particular Nahuatl words or phrases.

I thought the situations where these were used were mostly ones where we might
say "so" or "well" in English (I might expect something like "entonces" or
"bien" in Spanish).

The stories that the people tell in the video involve some maltreatment from
other people on account of the use of Nahuatl. I really liked the first
speaker's intuition, something like: "If we use our language, people are going
to be curious and want to learn it!"

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ASalazarMX
Oh, Nahuatl speaking people, how rare! They must be very busy maintaining the
Nahuatl Wikipedia
[https://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%C4%ABxatl](https://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%C4%ABxatl)

------
partycoder
The name of the language is Nahuatl rather than Aztec.

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WindowsFon4life
"Speak Aztec". wow. Nahuatl is actually from Utah. It's not an original
language of Mexico.

~~~
ASalazarMX
Utah was just a small part of a vast region where proto-nahuan languages are
theorized to have dominated. Proper Nahuatl is Aztec.

