Classical Nahuatl, also known simply as Aztec or Nahuatl, is a set of variants of Nahuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a lingua franca at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Indigenous languages, including Classical Nahuatl, remained dominant until the time when New Spain (Mexico) became independent in 1821. However, during the subsequent centuries, it was largely displaced by Spanish and evolved into some of the modern Nahuan languages in use (other modern dialects descend more directly from other 16th-century variants). Although classified as an extinct language, Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed by Nahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.
Classical Nahuatl may be called Codical Nahuatl (when referring to the variants employed in the Mesoamerican codices through the medium of the Aztec script) or Colonial Nahuatl (if written in post-conquest documents in the Latin alphabet).
Classification
Classical Nahuatl is one of the Nahuan languages within the Uto-Aztecan family. It is classified as a central dialect and is most closely related to the modern dialects of Nahuatl spoken in the valley of Mexico in colonial and modern times. It is probable that the Classical Nahuatl documented by 16th- and 17th-century written sources represents a particularly prestigious sociolect. That is to say, the variety of Nahuatl recorded in these documents is most likely to be more particularly representative of the speech of Aztec nobles (pīpiltin), while the commoners (mācēhualtin) spoke a somewhat different variety.
Phonology
Vowels
Consonants
Accent
Stress generally falls on the penultimate syllable. The one exception is the vocative suffix (used by men) -é, which is added to the end of a word and is always stressed, e.g. Cuāuhtliquetzqui (a name, meaning "Eagle Warrior"), but Cuāuhtliquetzqué "O Cuauhtliquetzqui!"
When women use the vocative, the stress is shifted to the final syllable without adding any suffix. Oquichtli means "man", and oquichtlí means "O man!"
Phonotactics
Maximally complex Nahuatl syllables are of the form CVC;
that is, there can be at most one consonant at the beginning and end of every syllable. In contrast, English, for example, allows up to three consonants syllable-initially and up to four consonants to occur at the end of syllables (e.g. strengths) (ngths = /ŋkθs/).
Consonant clusters are only allowed word-medially, Nahuatl uses processes of both epenthesis (usually of /i/) and deletion to deal with this constraint.
For such purposes, tl /tɬ/, like all other affricates, is treated as a single sound, and not all consonants can occur in both syllable-initial and syllable-final position.