Eastern and Western Nahuatl Dialects

As noted in previous blogs, I am working on analyzing and understanding Nahuan dialectology, dialectology of course being the study of patterns of regional variation.

The way this works is that one looks at the linguistic traits that vary between how Nahuatl is spoken in different regions, and then classify the dialect of each region into the varieties that they are most similar to. Classification can be based simply on superficial similarity, grouping everything similar together, or it can be based on historical development, where you classify dialects together that seem to share a single origin because they display shared innovations.

Another way is to classify by region. Here the tricky part is that the number of possible regions is almost infinite. One could potentially classify each of the many thousand local communities where the 1,5 million Nahuatl speakers live each as a separate dialect. Because every local community has certain ways of speaking that set them off from their neighbors. Dialect areas then are areas regions where certain traits a more frequent than in other regions, with the caveat that not every dialect in the area necessarily has all of the features characteristic of the area were it is spoken, and some dialects in other regions may have them too.

In the literature on Nahuatl dialectology the basic division is both regional and historical. It divides all the Nahuan languages into two basic groups: The Eastern and the Western dialects. This grouping was first proposed by Una Canger and Karen Dakin in 1985. They had realized that some dialects systematically had the vowel /i/ in certain words where other dialects had /e/. They also noted that all of the words where this correspondence was found corresponded to words that had oeiginally had the vowel *u in Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA).  The words they focused on were tesi/tisi "to grind" (from PUA *tusu), sentli/sintli "corn" (from PUA *sunu), iste/isti "fingernail" (from PUA *sutu) and ihte/ihti "stomach" (which Daking and Canger reconstruct as coming from PUA *patu, I am personally a little dubious of this form). The i forms were generally found in the dialects in the extreme eastern range of the area where Nahuatl is spoken, and the e forms were generally found in the western extreme.

Later Dakin (2000) and Canger (1988) each added some new traits to each of the two areas. Canger noted that in the Western area, the prefix o- is used to mark the past tense, and in the Eastern area it is absent, and that Eastern dialects tend to put the adverb ok after the predicate it modifies whereas in the West it precedes it. Dakin noted that the Western dialects tend to have ye- in a number of forms where the Eastern dialects have e- (e.g. yetl/etl (bean), yestli/estli (blood), yeyi/eyi (three) and yepatl/epatl "skunk"). Dakin saw that each of these words originally began with *p in PUA, and she surmised that the *p had changed into /y/ in the West but had disappeared entirely in the East.

In a recent paper of my own I argue that the two dialect areas also differ in the way that they negate sentences. Western dialects all use the adverb ahmo or ammo as the negator in all sentences. But in Eastern Nahuatl other words are used, either instead of ahmo or in addition to ammo. For example in the Huasteca region the negator is the prefix ax-, in the Puebla Highlands it is kanah, in Guerrero it is ka, and in the isthmus it is aya', ate, the prefix ah- or in Tabasco the word até and in El Salvador nite, inte ot tesu. In many Eastern varieties there are more than one negator and the use depends on the mood of the clause, one may be used for imperatives, subjunctives and conditionals and another for realis/indicative sentences for example.

The map below shows the locations of Eastern (red) and Western (blue) dialects. It also includes the extinct Pochutec language which seems to have split from proto-Nahuan before the split between Eastern and Western varieties. I have colored the varieties of Central Guerrero purple, that is because they seem to me to be conservative sharing few of the innovations of the other areas, and possibly have split also very early perhaps before the East-West split. (Note also that the varieties in Chiapas went extinct in the early 20th century, and that there are very few speakers in Jalisco).

"Classical" and Central Nahuatl are mixed dialects!

So what about "Classical Nahuatl". Well first of all I don't think that is a very good name for the colonial Nahuatl that we know from so many sources. I think it is better to call it colonial Nahuatl. The best known variety of colonial Nahuatl is the one from Mexico City, based on the dialect of Tetzcoco. Canger (2011) has argued very convincingly that this dialect which she calls Urban Nauatl, was a mixture of Eastern and Western varieties, that arose as people form different dialect areas mingled in the great city of Tenochtitlan.

Definitely many of the Central varieties seem to have traits from both Eastern and Wstern branches, and it is sometimes difficult to classify them. This is probably because the Eastern varieties must have been in the area longest and Western dialects then arrived later imposing their prestige language on the earlier speakers of Eastern Nahuatl. This would mean that many of the Central dialects (e.g. in Puebla, Morelos, Zongolica) are Western dialects with an Eastern substrate.

Works cited:

*Canger, Una. 1988. “Nahuatl Dialectology: A Survey and Some Suggestions” International Journal of American Linguistics 54:28-73.
*Canger, Una. 1988b [1978]. Subgrupos de los dialectos Nahuas. In Smoke and Mist, Mesoamerican Studies in memory of Thelma Sullivan. Kathryn Josserand & Karen Dakin (eds.) B.A.R. International Series 402.
*Canger, Una. 2011. "El nauatl urbano de Tlatelolco/Tenochtitlan, resultado de convergencia entredialectos, con un esbozo brevísimo de la historia de los dialectos". Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl (Mexico: UNAM): 243–258.
*Canger, Una and Karen Dakin. 1985. An inconspicuous basic split in Nahuatl. International Journal of American Linguistics 51: 358–361.
*Dakin, Karen. 2000. Proto-Uto-Aztecan *p and the e/ye isogloss in Nahuatl Dialectology. In UtoAztecan: Structural, Temporal, and Geographic Perspectives. Eugene Casad & Thomas Willett (eds.) Hermosillo, Mexico: University of Sonora. pp. 213-19

Decline of Nahuatl in Morelos (part II)

In my previous post I argued that the state of Morelos was predominantly Nahuatl speaking in 1910. As we know, that is not the case anymore.

In this post, I use three sources to show the decline of Nahuatl in Morelos from 1897 to 2014 graphically.

The earliest source is an 1897 Nahuatl wordlist compiled by Antonio Peñafiel, on the map I plot in all the communities where he collected Nahuatl vocabulary. As a minimum we know that there were Nahuatl speakers in those locations in 1897. In 1941 anthropologist Robert Barlow was involved in a project meant to teach Nahuatl language literacy to the Nahua of Morelos. He tested a group of teachers and the locations of the towns where they were from is plotted in on the map. In 1976 Karen Dakin and Diane Ryesky surveyed Nahuatl in Morelos and found Nahuatl speakers in a couple of communities that I haven't put on this map yet, in Axochiapan and Atlacholoayan. And then today Nahuatl is spoken in 6 communities of which Cuentepec is the only one where it is the main community language spoken by all age groups. In Tenextepango in the municipality of Ayala, the speakers are all originally from Guerrero who arrived in the state within the past 40 years.

I have plotted the towns into this map of the state of Morelos, using different colors to distinguish the age of the last attestation of Nahuatl spoken in the locality in the sources I use. They give a visual representation of the process of decline, starting from the lowlands that were most severely affected by the violence of the revolution. 

Today revitalization efforts are undertaken in Hueyapan,  Xoxocotla, Tetelcingo, Sta. Catarina, Ayala/Tenextepango, and in Coatetelco - so the map may look different 50 years form now again.

Here is my map (please don't use it without attribution to me):

Of Statistics, Lies and Genocide: How many Nahuas lived in Morelos before the Revolution?

[This post is based on work in progress, so if you would like to cite the material or argument, please contact me by email first to get the most recent version of the argument, and my permission]

The way that statistics can be used to create reality is well known, and so is the way that censuses can be used to make inconvenient segments of the population look less significant than their actual numbers suggest. Many Native American scholars have made incredible efforts trying to create realistic estimates of indigenous American populations at different times in history (Russell Thornton's work is particularly excellent). But this endeavor is always difficult due to the challenges of finding out how well census data actually represents native populations. 

A group of Zapatista soldiers.
Pedro Lavana came from the Nahua
community of Hueyapan, Morelos.
Courtesy of the Casasola Collection.

In this post (based on a part of the history chapter of my dissertation), I look at how the indigenous Nahua population of Morelos has been counted and represented before during and after the Mexican Revolution. This is an important topic because it speaks to the question of how much indigenous involvement was a part of the Zapatista movement. Since the seminal study of John Womack "Zapata and the Mexican Revolution" (1969), the consensus has been that the Zapatista movement was primarily a mestizo agrarian rebellion. But in this post I aim to demonstrate this to be completely false. Womack based his idea of the rebellion on a misreading of census data that caused him to vastly underestimate the indigenous element of the population of Morelos in 1910. 

Womack (1969:71) dedicates but a footnote to the ethno-linguistic composition of Morelos at the turn of the 20^th century, and to the question of Zapata's possible relation with the Nahuatl language. He cites a 1962 UNAM master's thesis in geography that analyses census data in Morelos from 1900 to 1930. From this work, which I have not been able to consult, he extracts the information that Nahuatl speakers only made up 9.29% of the population of Morelos at the time the Revolution broke out. He also cites Sotelo Inclán's description of Zapata traveling to the village priest in Tetelcingo to get his help in deciphering the ancient Nahuatl titles of Anenecuilco, as evidence that Zapata did not know a word of Nahuatl. He claims that when the morelenses heard Madero's statement that he would return the lands appropriated by the haciendas to the indians, they interpreted “indian” to be simply the way city people referred to the rural peasantry but that they otherwise did not recognize their state as particularly Indian.

The 1900 Mexican census did collect data about indigenous languages spoken. So far Womack is on the right track. The census questionnaire (which is available online here) provided a field with the title “Idioma nativo o lengua hablada”, the instructions to the person administrating the census stated clearly the procedure for filling out the field: 

“En la columna 11 debe escribirse el nombre de la lengua nativa ó hablada comunmente, como castellano, francés, inglés, etc., ó bien el nombre del idioma indígena, como por ejemplo el mexicano ó nahuatl, el zapoteco, el otomí, el tarasco, el maya, el tzendal, el huasteco, el totonaco, etc., etc. A la persona que hable el castellano y un idioma indígena, como el otomí ó el mexicano ó cualquier otro, se le anotará de preferencia el castellano.” [In column 11 should be noted the name of the native or commonly spoken language, such as Spanish, French English etc. Or also the name of the indigenous language, such as Mexicano or Náhuatl, Zapotec, Otomí Tarascan, Maya, Tzeltal, Huastec, Totonac etc. For the person who speaks Spanish and an indigenoys language such as Otomi, Mexicano or any other, Spanish will be noted by preference. (my emphasis).]

 These instructions meant that for bilingual persons only Spanish should be noted, which in turn means that the percentage figure given for speakers of Nahuatl includes only monolingual Nahuatl speakers, whereas bilingual Nahuas (and any ethnic Nahuas who did not speak the language) are counted as Spanish speakers. In 1900 using this way of counting, the number of speakers of indigenous languages was 16,9% monolingual Nahuatl speakers. Today, there are few communities with percentages of monolingual speakers of indigenous languages as high as 16% and in those communities the vast majority of inhabitants tend to speak Nahuatl as a first language and Spanish as a second language. Towns with similar numbers of monolinguals are found in for example in the Zongolica region, where census figures today suggest that a breakdown of 10% monolinguals would correspond well to a demographic composition with 10-20% monolingual speakers of Spanish and 70-80% Spanish/Nahuatl bilinguals. Given that the state of Morelos had 161,000 inhabitants in 1900, that would suggest a composition with approximately 16,000 monolinguals, and at probably least 100,000 bilingual Nahuas in the state.

However in the 1910 census, which seems to have used the same questionnaire, for some reason the number of Nahuatl speakers in Morelos declined to 9%, only to jump back up to 14% in the 1930 census, the first one after the revolution. There is no record of any events in Morelos in the period that would have plausibly caused the Indigenous population to drop by almost 40% in this ten year period. The same abrupt jump in the reporting of indigenous people is found in most of the states in the 1910 census. This seems to suggest some kind of irregularity with the 1910 census. Probably this means that the census for practical or logistical reasons did not adequately sample the rural population at this time. In any case, the figure of 9% is an anomaly that seems to under represent Nahuatl speakers by about 5%. And at the same time, contrary to what Womack clearly believes, it does not pretend to provide the total number of Nahuatl speakers, only the number of monolingual speakers. 

This of course means that when Womack takes the percentage of monolinguals to refer to the total number of speakers he is vastly underestimating the number of Nahuatl speakers of Morelos. And in contrast to his glib assertion that there were hardly any Indians there, we would be justified in considering at least 70% of the population of 161,000 people to have been Nahuatl speakers. This suggests that contrary to Womack's assertion, it is quite likely that Zapata spoke Nahuatl, and the eyewitness testimony of Doña Luz Jiménez which Womack also ignores, corroborates that he did. 

In the 1930 census the questionnaire gave the possibility of recording two languages, first whether the respondent spoke the national language or not, and then in the second slot which other language they spoke. This means that for 1930 the figure of 14% Nahuatl speakers includes both monolingual and bilingual speakers. The total population of Morelos in 1930 was 130,000, 30,000 less than before the Revolution. Based on the percentages of Nahuatl speakers we can estimate the indigenous population of Morelos at ca. 100,000 in 1910 (possibly more, including both bi- and monolingual speakers), and we can show that after the war it had been reduced to less than 20,000 (also including both mono and bilinguals).

Given the relatively modest decline in the total population from 1910 to 1930 this figure of an 80% indigenous population loss may seem exaggerated. But the population loss is hidden in the censuses because they don't take into account the influx of out-of-state people in the 7 years following the Revolution. The fact that indigenous population loss was much greater than what the raw population figure suggests is also shown by cohort analyses that show that the people counted in 1910 are not the same as the ones counted in 1930. For example of the 90,000 women counted in Morelos in 1910 only 35,000 were counted again in 1930 (McCaa 2003). This points to a drastic decline in native born (mostly Nahuatl speaking) Morelenses and their replacement of people from other states after the war. The argument could be further supported if the portion of Morelos residents born out of state could be shown to have increased drastically from 1910 to 1930, but unfortunately I have not been able to find this piece of information in the census even though the census did ask for state of birth.

This is a clear example of how census data can be used to mask what was essentially a genocidal event, and to mask the participation of indigenous peoples in National history.

*Womack, J. (1969). Zapata and the Mexican revolution. Random House LLC.
*McCaa, R. (2003). Missing millions: the demographic costs of the Mexican revolution. Mexican Studies, 19(2), 392-93