Feathers of the Roseate Spoonbill

Classical Nahuatl was the language of the Aztec Empire. Although Classical Nahuatl is no longer actively spoken, it is related to modern Nahuatl, which has approximately 1.5 million speakers, mainly in Mexico.

Over the centuries, scholars have proposed several different writing systems for representing Classical Nahuatl. Some early approaches from the 16th century were based on the system used for Spanish at the time. However, this approach faced challenges in how to represent sounds and distinctions that were not present in Spanish.

One solution is to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA is designed to represent all sounds of human speech unambiguously, and so it provides a reliable transcription system that can be read by linguists across the world. However, the IPA is often unwieldy and does not reflect the needs of particular language communities. Therefore, the IPA is rarely used by non-linguists.

Some more recent proposals are therefore designed specifically with Nahuatl in mind, in order to ensure both ease of use (which the IPA lacks) and faithfulness to the language (which the 16th-century systems lacked). To illustrate some of the writing systems that have been proposed over the years, the name of the Nahuatl language can be written as nahuatlatolli in a 16th-century writing system, /nawatɬaʔtoːlli/ in the IPA, or nahuatlàtōlli in a 20th-century writing system.

Below is the first stanza of a Nahuatl poem, “The Song of Temilotzin.” On the left is the poem as it appears in a manuscript of the 16th century (modified slightly for clarity). On the right, the text has been rewritten in a system proposed more recently, in the 20th century.

Here are some words and phrases from “The Song of Temilotzin” in the 16th-century writing system, along with their equivalents in the IPA, as well as English translations: