Nahuatl lyric

Comparative studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown Nahuatl as almost the southernmost member of the family, known as Uto-Aztecan or Yuta-Nawan, which extends in a wide swath as far north as the Shoshone and Paiute people in modern Oregon. This reconstructed linguistic geography fits with the Aztecs’ foundation legend, bu which they claimed to have come from Aztlan (‘Heron place;) an island somewhere unknown in the north-west. So they may have learnt their nahuatl before they came to the Valley of Mexico in 1256, initially as vagrants …….. ~ Page 351

Before the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl should thus be seen as at best an effective lingua franca of the multinational and multilingual empire: the empire included areas where the indigenous population to this day speak Zapotec, Mixtec, Tarasc an, Otomo, Huastec and Totonac languages, none of them related to one another or to Nahuatl.. But in the fifteenth century, contact between the subject lands and the centre of tenochtitlan must have been intense, at the level of tribute-gathering, and also through the network of pochteca, ‘merchants’, who also functioned as ambassadors and spies, and were so highly placed in the Aztec hierarchy … Page 355