Classical Nahuatl: The Aztec Empire's Literary Language

Classical Nahuatl is the literary form of Nahuatl spoken and written in central Mexico's Basin of Mexico region at the time of Spanish contact in 1519, serving as the administrative and literary language of the Aztec Empire and belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language family, one of the largest indigenous language families of North America, spanning from the western United States down through Mexico and Central America.

Classical Nahuatl was originally written using a partly pictographic and partly phonetic writing system before Spanish Franciscan missionaries, working with Nahua scholars in the sixteenth century, adapted the Latin alphabet to write Nahuatl, enabling an unusually large surviving corpus of colonial-era Nahuatl-language documentation, including both indigenous testimony and missionary-produced material, that gives historians rare direct access to indigenous Mesoamerican perspectives following conquest. Classical Nahuatl religious vocabulary describes an extensive Aztec pantheon centered on deities including Huitzilopochtli, the sun and war god, and Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent associated with wind, knowledge and priesthood, whose worship structured Aztec state religion and its associated calendar and ritual sacrifice.