Southern Yutonahua

Southern Yutonahua is the Mexican branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, strung along the Sierra Madre Occidental from Sonora and Chihuahua down to the Valley of Mexico and, through the migrant Nawat tongue, as far as Central America. Its branches include Tepiman, Tarahumaran, Cahitan, Opata, Coracholan and Nahuan, the languages of the Nahuas.

Nahuatl has been spoken in central Mexico since at least the 600s, and by the 1300s the Mexica of Tenochtitlan were carrying their dialect across the highlands as a language of power. These languages are agglutinative, and Nahuatl grew highly polysynthetic, sharing calques and traits with Maya, Mixtec and other neighbours in the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.

After the Spanish conquest missionaries gave Nahuatl the Latin alphabet, and the Classical Nahuatl of the 1500s produced grammars, poetry and the twelve books of the Florentine Codex.