Nāwatl is the most widely spoken native language in mexico, with around 2 million active speakers as of the last census. Nāwatl was spoken by the Aztecs, as well as many of their neighbors, subjects, and their predecessors the Toltecs.
Nāwatl is a native american language from the Uto-Nāwan or Uto-Aztecan family, and it has no relation to spanish except for being exposed to it after the conquest of mexico.
unfortunately, Nāwatl has never had a very unified existence, so even today 28 variants of the language exist, and not all of them are mutually intelligible. the most widely spoken variant is called Huasteca, named after the region where it’s spoken.
the type of Nāwatl that was spoken by the Aztecs was a very urban, “modern” type of Nāwatl for its time. it included unusual abbreviations and contractions, a wealth of loan words from other languages, and most interestingly it included an intense and convoluted “respectful” form spoken mostly by nobility, which involved making words unnecessarily long on purpose to make them sound fancier.
Aa Ee Ii Oo Āā Ēē Īī Ōō
Ch ch Hh Kk Kw kw Ll Mm Nn Pp Ss Tt Tl tl Ts ts Ww Xx Yy
nowadays, Nāwatl is largely pronounced like spanish by younger speakers. long vowels for the most part aren’t that important to distinguish when you speak, but are still maintained as pitch/length shifts from short vowels.
you’ll notice there are several two-character “letters” (digraphs) in Nāwatl that don’t exist in spanish; kw, tl, and ts. It’s important to remember each of these counts as one letter, and they will never be split up between syllables.
quick guide to unusual letters:
ch is pronounced like “chili”
kw is pronounced like “quest” or “queen” at the start of a syllable. at the end of a syllable, it is pronounced more like simply “k”
tl is pronounced by putting your tongue on the roof of your mouth as if you’re about to say “long.” With your tongue in that position, blow out through the sides of your tongue, like you’re pronouncing letter H.
ts is pronounced like “tsunami”
another important note for pronunciation is, stress always goes on the second-to-last syllable in Nāwatl. so in a one-syllable word like “ātl,” the stress goes on the only available syllable; ātl. in a two-syllable word, such as “tepētl,” the stress goes on the first syllable; te-pētl. moving on to 3-syllable words, the stress goes on the middle syllable. so for example, the word “āltepētl” would break up into; āl-te-pētl. a four-syllable word like “tiōkalli” breaks up like so; ti-ō-kal-li.
Nāwatl does not like to have two vowels together in a syllable, and its most basic syllable is a single vowel. this is because Nāwatl’s basic syllable structure is:
(C)+V+(C),
where C = consonant and V = vowel.
So the syllable forms you’ll run across are; V, VC, CV, and CVC. all types can appear basically anywhere in a word, but CVC most often appears in the middle. In general, you won’t find two V syllables together, but when you do remember they won’t combine like in “rain” or “italia,” or even like “oi!”
some common two-vowel combinations and their pronunciations:
oa - sounds like “oh-a”
ao - sounds like “ah-o”
oi - sounds like “o-wee”
ia - sounds like “ee-ya”
ai - sounds like “ah-ee”