Grammar, Dialectal Variation, and Honorific Registers in Nahuatl in Seventeenth-Century Guatemala

1

Grammar, Dialectal Variation, and Honorific Registersin Nahuatl in Seventeenth-Century Guatemala

SERGIO F. ROMERO

University of Texas at Austin

Abstract. This article examines honorific registers in Central Mexican andGuatemalan varieties of Nahuatl in seventeenth-century Guatemala, highlight-ing the importance of sociolinguistic methods for the dialectology of Meso-american languages. A comparative study of two pastoral texts reveals that thedifferences between the honorific registers of the Nahuatl varieties were quan-titative rather than categorical: the structure of honorifics is the same (for allsyntactic categories), but significant differences appear in the frequency ofhonorific marking, especially on verbs. Metalinguistic comments in Spanishsources provide evidence of the impact of these differences on stylistic marking,ethnic boundary work, and indexing of social status.

1. Honorifics and linguistic variation. Honorific address is one of the mostappropriate sites to investigate the relationship between grammar and culture.Honorific registers are “systems of linguistic signs linked by their users to stere-otypes of honor or respect” (Agha 2002:21). They involve culturally acceptedmodels of linguistic behavior consisting of gesture and demeanor norms as wellas a linguistic repertoire, that is, a stereotyped set of concatenated content andfunction words. The linguistic expression of rank, authority, and deference inlanguages with honorific registers conjoins intricate syntactic and morphologicalpatterns, on the one hand, and cultural values and social hierarchy, on theother. What distinguishes honorific registers from other forms of deference,however, is their ability to divide the entire lexicon into honorific and nonhonor-ific forms in accordance with native speaker evaluations of usage (Agha 1998:154). Honorific concord may be present as well, becoming an important struc-tural component of the morphology of the language in question. In someinstances, graded lexical alternations define “levels” of deference to referentor addressee. For example, in Amanalco, Tezcoco, near Mexico City, Nahuatlspeakers divide speech registers into three levels: yektþaýtolli ‘proper speech’,kamanalli ‘joking speech’, and tþa:katþaýtolli ‘justice speech’. Each level in-volves an intricate array of sublevels, which Amaneltecas describe in terms ofthe following features: lexical choices (the presence or absence of directionalmarkers in imperative verbs, for example), social status of addressees (whetherone is addressing friends or ritual kin), context (the town square or the city hall),and honorific concord (Peralta 1998). “Levels” are metalinguistic labels refer-ring to explicit norms of linguistic behavior and are part and parcel of theideologies regimenting oral communication.

2 ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS 56 NO. 1

The structure and social roles of honorific registers have been well docu-mented in the literature, especially in Javanese, Japanese, Tibetan, and Nahua-tl (Hill and Hill 1978; Errington 1985; Peralta 1998; Agha 2002; Silverstein2003, 2004). However, little work has been devoted to the relation betweenhonorific performance and regional variation. This is surprising if we considerthat variation is precisely what enables the gradient expression of reverence,ritual, and pragmatic trope associated with honorific discourse. Differences incompetence or performance across communities weave the texture of sociallandscapes. They are privileged sites for the indexical marking of cultural cate-gories, social classes, and ethnic boundary work. Subtle differences in the lin-guistic performance of honorification constitute the flesh and blood of socialidentities and cultural allegiances. This is especially so in situations of inter-ethnic conflict, as in colonial Latin America.

In this article, I compare the grammars of honorific registers of CentralMexican and Guatemalan Nahuatl varieties spoken in seventeenth-centuryGuatemala and their role as ethnolinguistic stereotypes.1 Substantial numbersof speakers of Mexican varieties of Nahuatl arrived in Guatemala in 1523 asallies of the invading Spanish forces, settling near Spanish towns where theymaintained their language until the late nineteenth century (Matthew 2000).“Guatemalan Nahuatl” references varieties of Central Nahuatl spoken inGuatemalan before the Spanish and their Nahuatl-speaking Mexican alliesarrived in 1523. Guatemalan Nahuatl is outlined in the Arte de la lengua vulgarMexicana de Guatemala que se habla en Ezcuintla y otros pueblos de esteReyno ‘Grammar of the Vulgar Mexican Language of Guatemala as Spoken inEscuintla and Other Towns of this Kingdom’ (Anonymous n.d. b) and is abun-dantly displayed in documents of diverse genres including pastoral, such as theTratado de la vida y muerte de Nuestro Señor Jesu Christo en lengua vulgarde Guatemala ‘Treatise on the Life and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ inthe Vulgar Tongue of Guatemala’ (Anonymous n.d. a), which I examine in thisarticle, and various annals, letters, and other notarial materials described byMatthew and Romero (2012). Guatemalan Nahuatl is structurally different from“Pipil,” the term used in the linguistic literature for Eastern Nahuatl varietiesspoken in pre-Hispanic and colonial Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua(Dakin 1981; Canger 1988).2 Guatemalan Pipil is now extinct, but SalvadoranPipil is still spoken today and is well documented by Schultze-Jena (1935) andCampbell (1985). The name “Pipil” appears only in Spanish sources and was notused for ethnic self-reference, however.3 Originally, it was an exonym used bysome Mexican Nahua4 to refer to Nahuatl-speaking populations of Guatemala.

The history and archaeology of the Guatemalan Nahua is the subject ofvigorous research today. Scholars agree that Nahua settlements existed at leastas early as 900 CE (Fowler 1989; Van Akkeren 2005; Matthew 2012). The Nahuaplayed a crucial role in the history of the Maya highlands, as is attested in thechronicles of the Kaqchikel and K’ichee’, whom they regarded as closely related

2014 SERGIO F. ROMERO 3

ethnic groups (Van Akkeren 2005). The literature, however, has not examinedsystematically the dialectal diversity of pre-Hispanic Nahua populations despitethe abundance of Nahuatl documentary sources in Guatemalan and Spanisharchives. The scholarly consensus until recently was that the presence of Cen-tral Nahuatl speakers in Guatemala was a consequence of the Spanish conquestor a purported lingua franca used in crosslinguistic communication (Dakin 1981;Dakin and Lutz 1996). The documents analyzed in this article, however, suggestthat it pre-dated the arrival of the Nahuatl-speaking Mexican allies of theSpanish and was the native vernacular of many Nahua populations in Guate-mala (Dakin and Lutz 1996; Matthew and Romero 2012).

Methodologically, this research falls under the rubric of historical socio-linguistics, the study of sociolinguistic variation using written documentarysources. Here I focus on two doctrines written in different Central Nahuatlvarieties published within a few decades of each other in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, the first in Mexico City and the second in Santiago deGuatemala. Both Central Mexican and Guatemalan Nahuatl have been extinctin Guatemala since the late ninteenth century; however, the wealth of docu-ments of different genres produced from the sixteenth to the eighteenth cen-turies provides a fair view of their sociolinguistic situation at the time. I beginwith a brief grammatical sketch emphasizing honorific registers. Next, I com-pare illustrative texts showing structural contrasts in categorical and gradientvariables. Finally, I examine the existing evidence for native metalinguisticviews of the differences and address their consequences for the development ofindependent standardized forms of both varieties in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Guatemala. I argue that the linguistic expression of honorific deferencein Nahuatl is inseparable from localized representations of ethnicity. Variationin the performance of honorifics is isomorphic with ethnic boundaries andcontrasting ideologies of power and legitimacy in colonial Guatemala.

2. The structure of honorific registers in Nahuatl. Nahuatl is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken today in Mexico by about one million speakers in thestates of Mexico, Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Guerrero, Jalisco, Colima, Durango,Veracruz, Hidalgo, and San Luís Potosí. Until the late nineteenth century it wasspoken also in southern and central Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, andNicaragua (Schultze-Jena 1935; Campbell 1985). A few elderly speakers remainin El Salvador, however, where there are ongoing revitalization efforts. Nahuatlis the southernmost Uto-Aztecan language and, together with Huichol and Cora,it is the only Uto-Aztecan language found in Mesoamerica today (Campbell1997). It shows substantial dialectal variation, which nevertheless does notinterfere with mutual intelligibility. Nahuatl dialectology, however, and thecriteria used to delimit regional variation are complex and have led to scholarlycontroversy in the past (Lehmann 1920; Lastra de Suárez 1986; Hasler Hangert1987, 2011; Canger 1988; Monzón 1990; Dakin and Lutz 1996; Kaufman 2001).


As background to the discussion of dialectal variation for the benefit of non-specialist readers, I provide here a few short remarks about colonial CentralNahuatl grammar.5

As can be seen in tables 1 and 2, Nahuatl phonology does not appear verycomplex by Mesoamerican standards. Perhaps the feature most discussed in theliterature is vowel length, which is phonemic, yet usually not marked in colonialdocuments such as the ones that are examined in this article. The secondimportant feature is the phonetic articulation of the alveolar lateral affricate tþ(spelled as +tl, in Classical Nahuatl), which is realized as [t] in some varietiesand is also subject to stylistic variation in colonial documents from Guatemala.

Table 1. Inventory of Nahuatl Consonant Phonemes

LABIAL ALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR GLOTTAL

STOPS p t k, kÑ ýFRICATIVES s òAFFRICATES ts, tþ tòAPPROXIMANTS w l yNASALS m n

Table 2. Inventory Nahuatl Vowel Phonemes

FRONT CENTRAL BACK

LONG* SHORT LONG SHORT LONG SHORT

HIGH i: iMID e: e o: o†

LOW a: a

NOTE: *Vowel length is marked by a colon. †There is no distinction between high and mid in back vowels; spellings vary freelybetween o and u in central Nahuatl.

Nahuatl shows a rich and complex morphology that includes reduplication,compounding, derivation, and noun incorporation (Andrews 1975). Subjects andobjects are marked as prefixes on verbs and additional derivational morphologyattaches on the right periphery of verbs. In (1), the leftmost prefix ni¤ marks thefirst person singular subject. It is followed by k¤, marking the third personsingular object.

(1) niktòi:wa tþaòkallini¤k¤tòi:wa tþaòkal¤li1SG.S-3SG.O-make tortilla-ABS

‘I make tortillas’

The form in (2) is semantically equivalent to (1), but the object tþaòkalli isincorporated into the verb. A somewhat clumsy rendering in English would be


‘I tortilla-make’. Notice that when an indefinite object is incorporated, objectagreement is not possible.

(2) nitþaòkaltòi:wani¤tþaòkal¤tòi:wa1SG.S-tortilla-make‘I make tortillas’

Example (3) shows the applicative derivation of the stem in (2); here the suffix¤lia introduces the beneficiary of the action expressed by the verbal stemtþaòkaltòi:wa ‘tortilla-make’.

(3) nimitstþaòkaltòi:wiliani¤mits¤tþaòkal¤tòi:wi¤lia1SG.S-2SG.O-tortilla-make-APPL

‘I make tortillas for you or on your behalf’

Finally, example (4) shows the causative derivation of the same stem; the suffix¤ltia introduces the person coerced into performing the verbal action.

(4) nimitstþaòkaltòi:waltia ni¤mits¤tþaòkal¤tòi:wa¤ltia

1SG.S-2SG.O-tortilla-make-CAUS

‘I make you make tortillas’

Applicative and causative suffixes double as honorific markers on verbs, as isseen below.

A basic understanding of the morphology of honorific registers is crucial forfollowing the arguments presented in the rest of this article. Pragmatically,Nahuatl honorifics act as referent honorifics, in which the target of reverence–called focus in the literature–is either the subject or the verbal object. Honorificlexemes are built morphologically; nouns, pronouns, prepositions, adjectives,adverbs, and determiners are marked as honorific with the suffixation of¤tsin6

(Pittman 1948; Hill and Hill 1978; Peralta 1998), as is seen in (5a)—(9b). In (5b),the suffix ¤tsin (HON) attaches to the nominal stem kal¤, contrasting with theunmarked form kalli ‘house’ in (5a). In the latter, the absolutive suffix ¤liindicates that the noun is neither possessed nor incorporated.

(5a) kal¤lihouse-ABS ‘house’

(5b) kal¤tsin¤tþihouse-HON-ABS

‘house (honorific)’


As can be seen in (6a), the absolutive suffix is omitted when the noun is pos-sessed; honorific marking is applied to the possessed form in (6b).

(6a) no:kitòno¤okitò 1SG.P-man‘my husband’

(6b) no:kitòtsinno¤okitò¤tsin1SG.P-man-HON

‘my husband (honorific)’

Honorific marking of an adjective is seen in (7b), and of a quantifier in (8b).

(7a) kÑal¤ligood-ABS

‘good, well’

(7b) kÑal¤tsin¤tþigood-HON-ABS

‘good, well (honorific)’

(8a) atòilittle‘a little’

(8b) atòiý¤tsinlittle-HON

‘a little (honorific)’

Finally, example (9a) shows the second person singular pronoun, and (9b) showsits honorific equivalent.

(9a) teýwa:¤tþ2SG.PRO-ABS

‘you’

(9b) teýwa:¤tsin2SG.PRO-HON

‘you (honorific)’

The grammar of honorific marking in verbal morphology, however, is sub-stantially more complicated. Honorific verb forms are constructed by increasingthe number of verbal arguments through the simultaneous affixation of thereflexive prefix and either the applicative or the causative suffix, dependingon the argument structure of the verb in question. A few irregular verbs takesuppletive allomorphs (Silva Galeana 1993:132).


Example (10a) shows the intransitive o:mik ‘he/she died’, and (10b) showsits honorific equivalent o:momikili, formed with the reflexive ¤mo¤ and appli-cative ¤lia. (Thus, the honorific form might be literally translated ‘he/she diedfor himself/herself’. However, such forms are completely conventionalized waysof expressing honorification in Nahuatl.) The default form [o:mik] is morpholo-gically simpler and more transparent than the honorific one: o:¤ is the optionalantecessive marker, a zero morpheme acts as third person singular subject, and¤miki is the verbal stem.

(10a) o:mik o:¤Ø¤mik(i)7

ANT-3SG.S-die‘he/she died’

(10b) o:momikilio:¤Ø¤mo¤miki¤li ANT-3SG.S-RFL-die-APPL

‘he/she died (honorific)’

Note that in (10b) the focus of deference is the deceased individual, not theaddressee of the utterance.

Similarly, honorific forms of transitive verbs require, first, the reflexive, andsecond, either the applicative or the causative suffix; an example of the former isseen in (11a) and (11b). In the honorific form (11b), the focus of deference iseither the addressee or the object of the verb.

(11a) tikittati¤k¤itta2SG.S-3SG.O-see‘you see it’

(11b) tikmottaliati¤k¤mo¤(i)tta¤lia2SG.S-3SG.O-RFL-see-APPL

‘you see it (honorific)’

Some transitive forms take the causative, rather than the applicative, as in(12a) and (12b). In this case, the verb ¤mati ‘know’ takes the causative suffix ¤tiaafter the root-final t is palatalized to tò.

(12a) tikmatiti¤k¤mati2SG.S-3SG.O-know‘you know it’


(12b) tikmomatòi:tiati¤k¤mo¤matòi:¤tia2SG.S-3SG.O-RFL-know-CAUS

‘you know it (honorific)’

Sometimes honorific forms involve a suppletive paradigm, as in (13a) and (13b).In the honorific version (13b), the copula ka: is replaced with the suppletive form¤yetstika accompanied by the reflexive prefix ¤mo¤.

(13a) teýwa:tþ tika: teo:panteýwa:¤tþ ti¤ka: teo:¤pan2SG.PRO-ABS 2SG.S-be God-LOC

‘you are in the church’

(13b) teýwa:tsin timoyetstika: teo:panteýwa:¤tsin ti¤mo¤yets¤ti¤ka: teo:¤pan2SG.PRO-HON 2SG.S-RFL-be-LK-be God-LOC

‘you are in the church (honorific)’

The fact that almost every part of speech can be variably marked as honor-ific makes a gradient indexing of honorific deference possible. Scholars usuallycall the various patterns of cooccurrence of honorific forms in discourse “honor-ific concord.” Different levels of honorific deference become possible dependingon the relative honorific saturation of discourse. In addition, salient elements ofNahuatl honorific speech are optional lexical choices. For example, in the SierraMalinche de Puebla, according to Hill and Hill (1978), honorific registers form asystem of four levels: level 1 is morphologically unmarked; level 2 is marked bythe presence of the directional marker ¤on¤ on the verb; level 3 involves thereflexive marker ¤mo¤ and the applicative or causative markers, as is seenabove, in addition to the directional marker ¤on¤. Finally, level 4, used onlywhen addressing ritual kin, involves also the use of the optional hortative par-ticle ma in imperative forms. The ascent from level 1 of honorification to level 4correlates with the gradient, cumulative saturation of discourse with honorificmorphological markers and lexicon, which I call honorific concord above (Hilland Hill 1978; Silva-Galeana 1993).

With this brief outline of the grammar of Nahuatl honorifics, we can turn toaddressing its implications for dialectal variation in Mesoamerica and Guate-mala in particular.

3. Regional variation in Aztecan (Nahuan). Scholars more or less agree onthe general classification of Nahuatl dialects represented in the outline in table3. This subgroup of Southern Uto-Aztecan is generally known as “Aztecan” inthe linguistic literature, although Terrence Kaufman calls it “Nawan” (Canger1988; Kaufman 2001). The two main branches are Pochutec and General


Nahuatl (in Kaufman’s spellings, “Pochuteko” and “General Nawa”). The for-mer is an extinct variety spoken until the 1930s in Pochuta, Oaxaca (Boas 1917).General Nahuatl includes every other variety remaining in Mexico and CentralAmerica today. The two Central-Western varieties that I focus on in this arti-cle are Guatemalan Nahuatl and Central Mexican Nahuatl8 as recorded inseventeenth-century pastoral documents written in the Roman alphabet. Thegeneral classification of Aztecan is based on isoglosses that demarcate largeareas. More localized variation, however, is not always well documented, espe-cially within Eastern dialects.

Table 3. The Dialects of Aztecan

A. Pochutec B. General Nahuatl

1. Eastern Nahuatla. Pipil; Gulf-Isthmusb. Sierra de Puebla; Huasteca

2. Central-Western Nahuatla. Central Nahuatl (Valleys of Mexico-Morelos-Puebla; Tlaxcala; Central

Guerrero; South-Eastern Puebla; Guatemala*)b. Western Nahuatl (Toluca; Northern Guerrero; South-Eastern Guerrero;

Michoacán, Guadalajara, Durango)

SOURCE: The classification follows Kaufman (2001). Kaufman’s terms “Nawan,” “Nawa,”and “Pochuteko” have been replaced by “Aztecan,” “Nahuatl,” and “Pochutec,” respec-tively (cf. Canger 1988).*Kaufman’s classification does not include Guatemalan Nahuatl. I have added it here forthe reader’s convenience.

Several isoglosses distinguish Eastern from Central-Western Nahuatl, as isshown in table 4. The distinctions are not always categorical, as successive epi-sodes of regional contact and localized innovation have created hybrid dialectsin which diagnostic eastern and central features overlap, such as Zongolica,Huasteca, and Pipil (see table 3). In contrast, Guatemalan Nahuatl texts con-sistently show every diagnostic feature of Central Nahuatl listed in table 4.

Table 4. The Isoglosses between Eastern and Central Nahuatl

DIAGNOSTIC FEATURES EASTERN NAHUATL CENTRAL NAHUATL (INCLUDES GUATEMALAN NAHUATL)

final vowel drops in yes nopreterit of class III verbsagentive suffix ¤ke:tþ or ¤keý ¤ki‘now’ a:man a:òka:n

SOURCE: Canger (1988).


Despite some disagreements on the details, Nahuatl scholars have achieveda consensus regarding the chronology of the spread of the language. Easterndialects came in the wake of ancient migrations of Nahuatl speakers into Meso-america (Canger 1988; Kaufman 2001; Hasler Hangert 2011). These varietiesdiversified and spread east and west from central Mexico, eventually reachingthe southern boundary of Mesoamerica. Based on archaeological evidence,William Fowler has argued that the Nahua arrived in El Salvador at least asearly as 900 CE (Fowler 1989). Central dialects, in contrast, entered Mesoamer-ica during more recent migrations from the north. This second wave includedthe ancestors of Mexicas, Tlaxcaltecas, Chalcas, and other Central Mexicanethnic groups that were flourishing at the time of the Spanish invasion in 1523(Kaufman 2001; Hasler Hangert 2011). The complex distribution of isoglossesthat we see today is the result of a long history of local innovation, successiveepisodes of contact between different regional varieties, and contact with otherMesoamerican languages (Kaufman 2001).

4. Nahuatl and Pipil in Guatemala. Guatemala is often seen as the cradle ofMaya civilization, a territory no larger than the state of Tennessee in whichMaya societies diversified and developed some of their most emblematic fea-tures. Guatemala’s Mesoamerican legacy was not exclusively Maya, however.Waves of Nahua settlers, including speakers of Central Nahuatl and Pipil vari-eties, began to settle along the Pacific coast late in the Classic period (250—950CE), exerting an important political and cultural influence on the HighlandMaya (Fowler 1989; Van Akkeren 2005). This is attested by numerous toponymsand loanwords in Kaqchikel and K’ichee’, for example, attesting to the impact ofNahuatl on the lexical domains of political structure, warfare, and calendrics(Campbell 1971). The K’ichee’ considered the Nahua–called Yaki in Kaqchikeland K’ichee’ sources–to be one of the primeval peoples from the mythicalTullan (Maxwell and Hill 2006).

Mexican speakers of Central Nahuatl were an important presence in colo-nial Guatemala as trusted Spanish allies, especially in the area around the cityof Santiago. The Spanish conquest of Central America was carried out with thecrucial help of thousands of Mexican allies who played key roles as soldiers,scouts, porters, and cooks. Many settled permanently near Spanish towns and,in exchange for their military service, were exempted from tribute, receivingmany mercedes ‘privileges’, such as encomiendas.9 In their correspondence withSpanish officials, they refer to themselves as indios conquistadores ‘Indianconquistadors’. Central Mexican Nahuatl was the language of communication inthis heterogeneous military force (Lutz 1994; Matthew 2000; Asselbergs 2008;Matthew 2012).

Structural and lexical differences between Central Mexican and Guatema-lan Nahuatl did not impede mutual intelligibility. The Spanish noticed thesedifferences and dubbed the latter lengua mexicana corrupta ‘corrupt Mexican


language’, assuming that differences were unfortunate local deviations fromCentral Mexican Nahuatl, which they regarded as prescriptively more proper.Guatemalan Nahuatl, however, is a Central dialect and does not differ fromCentral Mexican Nahuatl in the structural diagnostics given in table 4 above.10

Despite being in contact with Pipil, Guatemalan Nahuatl as attested in thesources does not share key diagnostic features with it. (See table 5 below fordifferences between Central Nahuatl and Pipil.) None of the numerous docu-ments in Guatemalan Nahuatl in archives in Guatemala and elsewhere showstructural or lexical Pipil influence (Matthew and Romero 2012). Texts claimedto be written in Pipil were misidentified and are actually in Central Nahuatlwith only occasional lexical input from Pipil, if any (Dakin 1981; León-Portilla1978; Megged 2013). Some scholars have tried to explain this archival gap bypositing that a variety of Central Nahuatl acted as a lingua franca or at least asa written standard in Guatemala. Pipil speakers might conceivably have writtenin a Central Nahuatl variety rather than in their own vernacular (Dakin 1981;Dakin and Lutz 1996). The evidence is not at all conclusive, but if so, the pur-ported written standard would be a Central variety distinct from Central Mexi-can Nahuatl, given its consistent lexical and phonological differences from thelatter.

Table 5. Diagnostic Features Distinguishing Central Nahuatl from Pipil

FEATURE CENTRAL NAHUATL PIPIL

plurals in ¤t no yespast participle or progressive no yes in ¤tukno absolutive on nouns ending no yes in lnemi ‘live’ acts as copulanu:tsa ‘call’ ‘speak’‘lice’ atemitþ or atimitþ atimet

SOURCE: Campbell (1985).

The differences between Guatemalan and Central Mexican writing conven-tions are few but systematic through the Guatemalan corpus. First, the Guate-malan orthography has +t,, rather than +tl,, where Central Mexican orthographyhas +tl, for the lateral affricate tþ; second, the back round vowel is consistentlywritten as +u, or +v, rather than +o,; third, lexical idiosyncrasies such as thenegator +ayac, aya:k are preserved in the texts (Dakin 1981; Matthew andRomero 2012). None of these features is unique, as most have been attested else-where in colonial documents. However, their cooccurrence in Guatemala and theclear contrast with documents following Central Mexican conventions suggesttwo distinct orthographic traditions. A few documents from Santiago de Guate-mala, however, show hypercorrections suggesting that some scribes inconsist-ently followed Central Mexican writing norms (Dakin and Lutz 1996). These


interesting texts, however, constitute only a small fraction of the Guatemalancorpus and are restricted to the metropolitan area of Santiago. Matthew (2012)suggests that Central Mexican Nahuatl may indeed have acted as a notariallanguage in areas with dense Mexican populations in Guatemala.

5. Honorification in Central Mexican and Guatemalan Nahuatl.Guatemalan and Central Mexican Nahuatl have the same honorific morphology.However, both Spaniards and Mexicans noticed that honorific verbal forms wereused with low frequency in Guatemalan Nahuatl. In particular, the author of theTratado de la vida y muerte de Nuestro Señor Jesu Christo en lengua vulgar deGuatemala ‘Treatise on the Life and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ in theVulgar Tongue of Guatemala’ (TC) claimed in his introduction that the satura-tion of verbs with honorific markers that was normal in Central Nahuatl riskedmaking Catholic doctrinal discourse unintelligible for Guatemalans (TC, fol.219r). The frequency of honorific marking, especially on verbs, is substantiallylower in Guatemalan doctrines than in texts of similar genres written in CentralMexico.

Excerpt 1 below from TC shows some of the diagnostic features of Guate-malan Nahuatl.

Excerpt 1

1 +Xiquitacam quenami vquichiuh Tutecuio Dios in achtu vquichti,, òi¤k¤itta¤kam kenami u¤Ø¤ki¤tòi:w tu¤te:kÑiyo: dios in atòtuHORT-3SG.O-see-PL how ANT-3SG.S-3SG.O-make 1PL.P-lord God D first

ukitò¤ti man-ABS

See how Our Lord created the first man,

2 +nuzam in vquitali ytucatzim Adam.,ukitò¤ti nusam in u¤Ø¤ki¤tali i:¤tu:ka:¤tsin adamman-ABS also D ANT-3SG.S-3SG.O-put 3SG.P-name-HON Adam and how he named him (hon.) Adam.’

3 +Vquiquitac Dios in aiac iecti catca ma izel nemizquia vquichti,,u¤Ø¤ki¤kitta¤k dios in aya:k yekti katka ma i:selANT-3SG.S-3SG.O-see-PRT God D no straight be HORT alone

Ø¤nemi¤skiya ukitò¤ti 3SG.S-live-SUB man-ABS

God saw that it was not fair that the man would be (living) alone,’

4 +in vquimacac Tutecuio Dios in Ad. ce huei cuchilizti.,in u¤Ø¤ki¤maka¤k tu¤te:kÑiyo: dios in adan se: we:yi kutòi¤listiD ANT-3SG.S-3SG.O-give-PRT 1PL.P-lord God D Adam one great sleep-NOM

So Our Lord God put Adam into a deep sleep.’


5 +Auh in itic cuchilizti in vquiquizti ce vmicicuilli.,aw in i:ýtik kutòi¤listi in u¤ki¤kis¤ti se: umikiýkÑilliPM D inside sleep-NOM D ANT-3SG.S-3SG.O-leave-CAUS one ribAnd in his sleep, [God] took out one [of Adam’s] ribs.’ (TC, fol. 232v)

What in Central Mexican Nahuatl would be tþ appears as t, as in +vquichti,ukitòti ‘male’ (lines 1 and 3) and +cuchilizti, kutòilisti ‘sleep’ (lines 4 and 5); thisis shown also in the Arte (Anonymous n.d. b). Second, the quantifier +ayac, aya:k‘nothing’ doubles as negator or negation marker (line 3). In contrast to thesyntactic versatility of quantifiers in Guatemalan Nahuatl, Mexican varietiesuse specific words such as koò, aýmo, aò, or matò as negation markers in verbphrases. Third, honorific marking is used sparsely in Guatemalan Nahuatl, asnoted above. Several phrases refer to God or other sacred beings, but only onereceives honorific marking, +ytucatzin, i:tu:ka:tsin ‘his name (HON)’ in line 2. Atleast eight other phrases would probably have been marked honorifically hadthey been written in Central Mexican Nahuatl, which mandates almost cate-gorical honorific marking on nouns or verbs when God, the Virgin, or saints aredirectly referred to.

The degree of honorific concord saturation varied across literary genresin colonial texts. Annals, letters, and wills, for example, use honorifics moresparingly than pastoral genres, such as catechisms, books of homilies, andconfessionals. Ethnographic works such as volume 6 of the Florentine Codex,Bernardino de Sahagún’s “Coloquios,” or the “Cantares Mexicanos” also showprofuse use of te:kpillaýto:lli ‘palace speech’, the complex honorific languageperformed in Mexica religious and civil rituals in which honorific concord wasessential (Sahagún 1986, 2012; León Portilla and Curiel 2011). The firstFranciscan authors and their native speaker collaborators modeled Christiandoctrinal language on te:kpillaýto:lli. Honorific concord became a stylistic cue fordoctrinal discourse and sacramental ritual. As a consequence, colonial linguistsin Mexico devoted a great deal of attention to it in their descriptive works andpastoral texts (Sahagún 1986, 2012; Carochi 2001). For this reason, doctrinasand catecismos are some of the best sources for the systematic study of colonialNahuatl honorifics. Spanish Mendicants wrote in close collaboration with nativespeakers and were sometimes native speakers themselves, as several were bornand raised in Mexico, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In order to probe the quantitative variation in honorific concord betweenGuatemalan and Central Mexican Nahuatl, I compared the seventeenth-centurytext TC11 to Fr. Ignacio Paredes’s Nahuatl catechism (RC), published in 1758 inMexico City (Paredes 1758). (Paredes’s work was a translation of Fr. Ripalda’scatechism, considered the standard Catholic catechism from the time of itspublication in 1616.) RC was written in Central Mexican Nahuatl. It showssystematic honorific concord, one of the diagnostic features of doctrinal Nahuatlin central Mexico.


As can be seen in excerpt 2 below, every noun or verb referencing theChurch, God, or Jesus Christ receives honorific marking. Honorific nouns andnominalizations include +itlaçohuallalitzin, i:tþasowa:llalitsin ‘his coming’ inline 1, +Tonantzin Santa Iglesia, tona:ntsin Santa Iglesia ‘our Mother theChurch’ and +itlaneltocacatzitzihuan, i:tþaneltokaka:tsitsiwa:n ‘her believers’ inline 2, and +Toteotemaquixticatzin, toteo:te:ma:ki:òtika:tsin ‘Our Savior’ in line3. Honorific verbs include +quimmocencahuilia, kimmose:nka:wilia ‘she pre-pares them’ in line 2, +quimolhuichihuililizque, kimolwitòi:wililiskeý ‘they cele-brate it’ in line 3, +omotlacatili, o:motþa:katili ‘he was born’ in line 4, and+otechmomaquixtili, o:te:tòmoma:ki:òtili ‘he saved us’ in line 5. In contrast to TC,written in Guatemalan Nahuatl, RC systematically marks as honorific all nounsand verbs referencing sacred beings. Note the presence of the suffix ¤tsin on therelevant nouns and nominalizations and the reflexive and applicative markerson verbs, both transitive and intransitive.

Excerpt 2

1 +In itlaçohuallalitzin in Totecuiyo Jesu-Christo, in motenehua Adviento,,in i:¤tþaso¤wa:lla¤li¤tsin in to:¤te:kÑyo: xesukristo in Ø¤mo¤te:ne:wa D 3SG.P-dear-come-APPL-HON D 3PL.P-lord Jesus.Christ D 3SG.S-RFL-call

adbiyento, AdventThe coming (hon.) of Our Lord Jesus Christ is called Advent.

2 +quîtoznequi, inon cahuitl, in ipan in Tonantzin Santa Iglesia, nepapan tlateomatiliztica, ihuan neyolchipahualiztica quimmocencahuilia in itlaneltocacatzitzihuan, in Christianôme;,Ø¤k¤iýto:¤s¤neki inon ka:witþ in ipan in to¤na:n¤tsin3SG.S-3SG.O-say-LOC-want that time D on D 1PL.P-mother-HON

santa iglesia nepa:pan tþa¤teo:¤ma:ti¤lis¤tika iwan holy church different INDEF.O-God-know-NOM-by and

ne¤yo:l¤tòipa:wa¤lis¤tika Ø¤kim¤mo¤se:n¤ka:wi¤lia RFL-heart-clean-NOM-by 3SG.S-3PL.O-RFL-one-leave-APPL

in i:¤tþa¤neltoka¤ka:¤tsitsiwa:n in kristianos¤me D 3SG.P-INDEF.O-believe-RED-POSSD.PL D Christians-PL

It means that that is the time in which Our Mother the Holy Church (hon.) prepares her believers (hon.), Christians, with different acts of devotion and purification

3 +inic quimolhuichihuililizque in Toteotemaquixticatzin Jesu-Christo;,in¤i:k Ø¤ki¤mo¤(i)lwi¤tòi:wi¤li¤li¤s¤keý D-by 3SG.S-3SG.O-RFL-feast-do-APPL-APPL-LOC-PL

in to¤teo:¤te:¤ma:¤ki:ò¤ti¤ka:¤tsin xesukristo D 1PL.P-God-INDEF.AN.O-hand-leave-CAUS-AG-HON Jesus.Christ so that they may celebrate (hon.) Our Savior Jesus Christ (hon.)


4 +in topampa in nican Tlalticpac omotlacatili,,in to¤pampa in nika:n tþa:lti:kpak o:¤Ø¤mo¤tþa:kati¤liD 1PL.P-cause D here earth ANT-3SG.S-RFL-be.born-APPL

who was born (hon.) here on earth on our behalf

5 +ihuan quintepan Cruztitech otechmomaquixtili.,iwan kinte:pan krus¤ti¤tetò o:¤Ø¤te:tò¤mo¤ma:¤ki:ò¤ti¤liand afterwards cross-LK-on ANT-3SG.S-us-RFL-hand-leave-CAUS-APPL

and afterwards saved us (hon.) on the cross. (Paredes 1758:1)

TC and RC were published within decades of each other, and both addresssimilar doctrinal matters: the first focuses on the life of Christ, while the secondis an extended exposition of Christian doctrine and ritual calendar. Both fallsquarely within the doctrinal subgenre of pastoral Nahuatl. The first consists offorty-four pages of text, the second of ninety-six pages. Not only is it evidentfrom the texts that the frequency of honorific marking is starkly different be-tween them, especially on verbs, but also metalinguistic comments in the intro-duction of TC show that this variation was openly discussed among pastoralauthors in Guatemala. I counted every occurrence of honorific marking in verbphrases in which God, Jesus Christ, or the Virgin were subjects, objects, or partof the verbal complement, a total of 464 relevant phrases in TC and 423 in RC.Of these, only twenty-five showed honorific marking on verbs in TC. In contrast,a hefty 405 received honorific marking in RC. The frequencies were 0.05 and0.95, respectively, as can be seen in figure 1.

Figure 1. Percentage of verb phrases showing honorific concord.

The most interesting result of this comparison was that these two sourcesshowed no structural differences in the morphology of honorification. The differ-ence was of a gradient, quantitative nature. In fact, some paragraphs in the


Tratado are as saturated with honorific marking as any in Paredes’s catechism.Nevertheless, the quantitative gap between Guatemalan and Central MexicanNahuatl was not only perceptible but was also remarked on in metalinguisticdiscourse, as attested in the introduction to TC and in the anonymous Arte(Anonymous n.d. b).

The short passage from TC in excerpt 3 shows dense honorific marking onnouns (+ipiltzim, i:¤piltsin ‘her child’, +ixillatzim, i:òila¤tsin ‘her womb’, and+tunantzim, tu¤na:n¤tsin ‘our mother’), prepositions (+itictzinco, i:¤iýtik¤tsin¤ko‘inside’), and verbs (+vmunacaiotzitzinu, u:¤mu¤naka:¤yo¤ti:¤tsinu ‘he was incar-nated’).

Excerpt 3

+Avh in yucqui vmunacaiotzitzinu ipiltzim Dios itictzinco çenquixca chipahuac imahuizyxilatzim Tunantzim Santa Maria,aw in yuýki u:¤Ø¤mu¤naka:¤yo¤ti¤tsinu i:¤pil¤tsin dios PM D thus ANT-3SG.S-RFL-meat-INHER.POSS-CAUS-HON 3SG.P-child-HON God

i:¤iýtik¤tsin¤ko se:nki:òka tòipa:wak i:¤mawis i:¤òila¤tsin 3SG.P-inside-HON-LOC eternal clean 3SG.P-honor 3SG.P-womb-HON

tu¤na:n¤tsin santa maria 1PL.P-mother-HON Saint MaryAnd in this way the Son of God (hon.) was incarnated (hon.) inside (hon.) the eternally immaculate womb (hon.) of our mother (hon.) Holy Mary. (TC fol. 235r).

Here the verb u:munaka:yotsi:tsinu is especially interesting. Honorific forms ofreflexive verbs require the suffix ¤tsinoa, rather than the usual applicative orcausative markers, a subtle detail of honorific marking.

Other complex elements of honorific registers are evident in TC as well.For example, the suffixation of deprecatory diminutives to speaker pronounsin combination with reverential suffixes on addressee pronouns, a subtle formof honorific concord seldom discussed in the Central Nahuatl literature, butattested also by the Hills in the Malinche, is found in direct speech throughoutthe text (Hill and Hill 1978). Excerpt 4, line 3, shows the juxtaposition of thehonorific suffix +¤tzim, ¤tsin and the deprecatory suffix ¤pul ‘diminutive’ in suc-cessive pronominal phrases, drawing a sharp indexical contrast between depre-catory speaker reference and honorific addressee reference: +Aquin tehuatzim?Aquin nu nehuapul?,. This is a nondetachable pragmatic effect, demonstratingthe intricate structure of honorification that remains in Guatemalan Nahuatl,even though it is not used as frequently as in Central Mexican Nahuatl.

Excerpt 4

1 +avh vquilhui: nutecuiu@, tehuatzim quinequi quipaca nuixitam?,aw u¤Ø¤k¤ilwi nu¤te:kÑiyu¤e: teýwa:¤tsin Ø¤ki¤nekiPM ANT-3SG.S-3SG.O-say 1SG.P-lord-VOC 2SG.PRO-HON 3SG.S-3SG.O-want


Ø¤ki¤pa:ka nu¤(i)kòi¤tam 3SG.S-3SG.O-wash 1SG.P-foot-LOC

And said: “My lord, you (honorific) want to wash my feet?

2 +Tehuatzim, in huel nelli Dios, nutepicavh, nutecuiutzim?,teýwa:¤tsin in wel nelli diyos nu¤tepikaw nu¤te:kÑiyu¤tsin2SG.PRO-HON D very true God 1SG.P-creator 1SG.P-lord-HON

You (honorific), the true God, my creator, my lord?

3 +Aquin tehuatzim? Aquin nu nehuapul?,a:kin teýwa:¤tsin a:kin nu neýwa:¤pulwho 2SG.PRO-HON who also 1SG.PRO-DIM

Who are you (honorific)? (And) who (dim.) am I?” (TC fol. 244v)

Note also in line 1 of excerpt 4 that third person agreement appears on the verb‘wash’, rather than expected second person, although the addressee is the sub-ject. This is a further sublevel of honorific concord that I have not seen inNahuatl colonial texts. Structurally, it is akin to honorific concord in K’ichee’ orSpanish, in which honorific-addressee marking requires third person agree-ment, and it could conceivably be the result of pragmatic borrowing from Span-ish or K’ichee’ (Romero forthcoming). Be that as it may, we are safe in sayingthat the full complexity of honorific marking was as present in Guatemalan as inCentral Mexican Nahuatl. Structurally, the same principles were instantiatedin both TC and RC, despite large quantitative differences. Similar gradient vari-ation of stylistic markers across dialect areas has been reported for AmericanEnglish, for example, where recent work by Labov and collaborators shows thatgradient variation in the realization of verb-final ¤ing involves different fre-quency thresholds in different dialect areas. Though the statistical pattern ofvariation is shaped like a logarithmic curve everywhere, the threshold valuesvary across different locations (Labov 2012). Gradient differences in honorificmarking, therefore, mark dialect areas and point to contrasting ways of relatinglanguage and cultural value in seventeenth-century Guatemala.

6. The cultural meaning of variation in honorific marking inGuatemalan Nahuatl. What did the differences in the amount of honorificmarking between Guatemalan and Central Mexican Nahuatl mean for theirspeakers in seventeenth-century Guatemala? Given the lack of direct testimonyby native speakers themselves, only an incomplete answer comes to us in themetalinguistic statements of pastoral authors. The anonymous Spanish writerof the TC states in his introduction that the lengua mexicana ‘Mexican lan-guage’, despite regional variation in Mexico and Guatemala, is really one andthe same language. He explains, however, that it “can be divided into threeparts or manners of speaking”: the vulgar, the reverencial, and the pipil (TC, fol.219r). First, the “vulgar” is identified as the colloquial vernacular spoken inGuatemala, what I have been calling Guatemalan Nahuatl in this article–the


variety in which TC was composed. Second, he explains that the reverencialinvolves the addition of partículas de reverencia ‘reverential particles’, addingthat such particles are suffixed to nouns and prefixed to verbs and include the“l” and the “o,” “which they use a lot,” in contrast to the vulgar, which does notuse the “l,” though it affixes the “o” optionally12 (TC, fol. 219r). Note that thevariation between [t] and [tþ] appears not only to be metalinguistically salient,but also to participate in stylistic variation. The author illustrates it with theword +tlactlacolli, ‘sin’ in the reverencial, which corresponds to +tactaculli, in thevulgar. He clarifies that the reverencial is spoken only “in the province ofMexico”; in Guatemala, in contrast, reverential particles are seldom used. Hewarns priests to avoid them because if they did not, “no nos entendieran porquemal se pueden tratar y conversar los que no se entienden [They would notunderstand us because those who do not understand each other can hardly beable to converse and engage]” (TC, fol. 220v). Finally, the third manner of speak-ing is what he calls pipil, glossed as lengua de muchachos ‘boys’ language’,13

which he describes as involving “pieces of Mexican vocabulary,” adding that it isspoken in certain towns only. He warns that pipil is not used to address Spanishresidents and priests, but only when speaking “among themselves.” To addresspriests and Spaniards, the vulgar vernacular was commonly used. The lengua demuchachos described above seems to be a structurally different variety thatshares some lexicon (“pieces of Mexican vocabulary”) with the vulgar. It is pro-bably the Eastern variety that I have called Pipil, which is not documented inany colonial text from Guatemala. This suggests a sociolinguistic scenario inwhich speakers of at least two different Nahuatl varieties coexisted in Nahuacommunities in Guatemala: Pipil and Guatemalan Nahuatl.

These extensive metalinguistic observations provide scant but valuableclues as to the linguistic practices and social meaning of variation in Nahuatl-speaking communities in Guatemala. First, the Spanish considered GuatemalanNahuatl and Central Mexican Nahuatl to be one language, based on the crite-rion of mutual intelligibility. The differences between Mexico and Guatemalawere construed as merely stylistic and Guatemalan Nahuatl was regarded aslacking the full range of styles available in Mexico City. Second, GuatemalanNahuatl followed different reverential norms involving a sparser use of honorificmorphology in discourse. The Spanish author of the TC draws an analogy be-tween Central Mexican and Guatemalan Nahuatl, on the one hand, and urbanSpanish and the Spanish of “villages and small towns” on the other. In theformer, Spanish is spoken entre caballeros y cortesanos “among gentlemen andcourtiers”; in the latter Spanish is humilde y de corto estilo “humble and limitedin style” (TC, fol. 231r).

The Spanish projected onto the Nahua their own language ideologies: noblesspeak the language with full propriety, while commoners speak it with a morelaconic stylistic repertoire. This recursive projection construes variation inhonorific use as iconic of the wealth and social rank of speakers (Irvine and Gal


2000). Mexico City’s Nahuatl was construed as the norm from which Guate-malan Nahuatl deviated, showing an impoverished set of “manners of speak-ing.” The linguistic performance of rank, deference, and ethnic difference amongthe Nahua in Guatemala did not follow Mexican norms. In fact, the latter seemto have been involved in ethnic boundary work distinguishing Guatemalansfrom Nahuatl-speaking Mexicans.

Spanish clergy ministering to the Nahua of Guatemala in the seventeenthcentury produced several pastoral works and even one arte de lengua, that is,one descriptive pedagogical grammar, the Arte de la lengua vulgar mexicana deGuatemala qual se habla en Escuintla y en otros pueblos de este reino ‘Grammarof the Vulgar Mexican Language Spoken in Escuintla and Other Towns of thisKingdom’, which I mentioned above (Anonymous n.d. b).14 The composition ofsuch ad hoc pastoral and linguistic materials in Guatemalan Nahuatl suggeststhat negative reactions to the Central Nahuatl used by the Spanish led to a sys-tematic reaccommodation of Nahuatl pastoral language. The catechisms anddoctrinas developed in central Mexico were not smoothly accepted in Guatemalain spite of mutual intelligibility between the two varieties. It is hard to assesswhat the impact of the Spanish invasion was on Guatemalan Nahua attitudestowards central Nahuatl, with which they must have been acquainted beforethe Spanish conquest. However, it is possible that the close military alliance be-tween Mexicans and Spaniards through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesinfluenced the social evaluation of Mexican varieties in Guatemala. CentralNahuatl could have been construed as language of conquerors, of indios con-quistadores.15

Guatemalan Nahuatl speakers developed a rich literary tradition with theirown adaptation of the Roman alphabet, learned from Franciscan and Dominicanclergy. My colleague Laura Matthew and I have identified more than sixty docu-ments in Guatemalan and Central Mexican Nahuatl written in Guatemalabetween the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries,including annals, land deeds, wills, padrones, and other notarial documents aswell as linguistic and pastoral works. A hefty 90 percent majority was composedin Guatemalan Nahuatl. Furthermore, the provenience of documents written inCentral Mexican Nahuatl varieties was, almost without exception, limited toareas where Mexicans settled after the Spanish conquest (Matthew and Romero2012). By the late eighteenth century, the production of notarial texts in Guate-malan Nahuatl seems to have come to an end, however. It survived as spokenlanguage in Guatemala and the last speakers died in Escuintla in the late nine-teenth century at about the same time as the last surviving speakers of CentralMexican Nahuatl in Guatemala (Matthew 2000).

Different ethnic identities found their linguistic expression in the gradientperformance of honorific concord. Regional differences were recruited as ethnicmarkers in a situation of interethnic tension in Guatemala in which quanti-tative variation undergirded the enregisterment of honorific forms as ethnic


1. “Central Nahuatl” and “Eastern Nahuatl” are not geographic descriptions, butrather labels used in Nahuatl dialectology to refer to dialect clusters sharing specificdiagnostic features. I use “Guatemalan Nahuatl” here to refer to varieties of CentralNahuatl spoken in Guatemala before the Spanish and their Nahuatl-speaking Mexicanallies arrived in 1523. More details are provided in the discussion below.

2. Dakin (1981) has suggested that Guatemalan Nahuatl simply instantiates a pan-Mesoamerican lingua franca rather than a local vernacular, noting its archaic structuralfeatures. However, there is scant evidence of the use of Nahuatl as lingua franca inMayan-speaking areas of highland Guatemala. As is discussed below, almost all colonialdocuments in Guatemalan Nahuatl were written in predominantly Nahuatl-speakingareas in central Guatemala or in the southern piedmont (Matthew and Romero 2012).

3. The earliest sixteenth century sources mentioning the term “Pipil” includechronicles by Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Diego García de Palacio, a letter by BishopFrancisco Marroquín, and the Relación Geográfica de San Bartolomé (Ruud VanAkkeren p.c. 2014).

stereotypes. In this process, the recursive projection onto Nahuatl of Spanishrepresentations of regional variation in Castilian Spanish could have played arole in establishing the local indexical values associated with Nahuatl honor-ifics. The stylistic continuum from rural to urban that those indexical valuespresuppose enacted a recursive projection of the Spanish sociolinguistic hier-archy onto the Guatemalan highlands. Negative reactions to Mexican honorificnorms, however, led to local recalibrations of Catholic pastoral registers and theemergence of a distinct Guatemalan Nahuatl pastoral and secular writing tradi-tion based on the Roman alphabet. The crystallization of Christian doctrinal andritual scripts was constrained by local linguistic economies and the culturalvalues of stable sociolinguistic alternations.

The indexical roles of local recalibrations of honorification norms such as theone discussed in this article alert us as to the importance of variationist methodsin the study of honorific registers and confirms the stunning capacity of humansto perceive subtle quantitative variation in language and to use it to index whothey are and how they stand vis-à-vis one another.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I thank Kathryn Sampeck for generously sharing her pre-liminary transcription of the “Tratado de la vida y muerte de Nuestro Señor Jesu Christoen lengua vulgar de Guatemala.” I also very much appreciate the comments and sugges-tions of the editor and of two anonymous reviewers. All errors are, of course, mine.

Abbreviations used in grammatical glosses: ABS = absolutive; AG = agentive; ANT =antecessive; APPL = applicative; CAUS = causative; D = deictic; DIM, dim. = diminutive; FUT= future; LOC = future; HON, hon. = honorific; HORT = hortative; INDEF.O = indefiniteobject; INDEF.AN.O = indefinite animate object; INHER.POSS = inherent possession; LK =linker; LOC = locative; NOM = nominalization; O = object; P = possessive; PL = plural; PM =phrase marker; POSSD = possessed; PRO = pronoun; PRT = preterit; RED = reduplication;RFL = reflexive; SG = singular; S = subject; SUB = subjunctive; VOC = vocative.

Abbreviations for historical sources: RC = Paredes 1758; TC = Anonymous n.d. a.Transcription. Spellings used in historical sources are in angle brackets + ,;

phonemic transcriptions are in italics, using IPA symbols.


4. Following the common Mesoamericanist practice, I use “Nahua” to refer to speak-ers of Aztecan varieties in general.

5. “Colonial Central Nahuatl” refers to the varieties in which documents were writ-ten in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Mexico. Although they show lexical andstructural variation, I address only shared structural features in this article.

6. The suffix¤tsin is both diminutive and honorific in most Nahuatl varieties.However, in some places it has become exclusively honorific and the pejorative suffix ¤tonhas extended its meaning to include diminutive derivation (Peralta 1998).

7. The final i in the stem miki deletes in the preterit.8. Central Mexican Nahuatl includes all varieties of Central Nahuatl except those

spoken in Guatemala. Guatemalan Nahuatl is a Central variety with diagnostic featuresthat distinguish it from Mexican varieties.

9. The encomienda was a land grant given to a Spaniard in reward for his services inthe conquest, which included the right to use native labor. In exchange, the beneficiarywas expected to provide for the evangelization of his charges.

10. See Dakin (1981) for more detail.11. Ken Ward’s examination of the typography and paper suggests that TC was

published no later than ca. 1750, though more likely it is from the seventeenth century.Ward is the Curator of Latin American Books at the John Carter Brown Library(Kathryn Sampeck p.c. 2012).

12. “O” refers to the optional antecessive marker o:¤ and “l” refers to the lateralaffricate tþ, which appears as t in some Central-Western varieties, including GuatemalanNahuatl, and in many Eastern varieties, including Pipil.

13. Pipil is the plural of pilli, meaning both ‘child’ and ‘person of noble status’. Theterm was not used by the Pipil for self-reference, but was an exonym used by the Spanishfollowing the practice of their Mexican allies.

14. I analyze this important text in work in progress.15. One of the reviewers suggests that differences in honorific marking between

Guatemalan and Central Mexican Nahuatl might be indexing different stances vis-à-visChristian practice. More comparative research is indeed needed to ascertain differencesbetween the reception of Christianity among the Guatemalan Nahua and the Spaniards’Mexican allies.

References

Agha, Asif 1998 Stereotypes and Registers of Honorific Language. Language in Society 27:

151—93.2002 Honorific Registers. In Bunka intaakushon gengo = Culture, Interaction,

and Language, edited by Kuniyoshi Kataoka and Sachiko Ide, 21—63.Tokyo: Kitsuji Shobo.

Andrews, J. Richard 1975 Introduction to Classical Nahuatl. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Anonymousn.d. a Tratado de la vida y muerte de Nuestro Señor Jesu Christo en lengua

vulgar de Guatemala. Guatemala City: Imprenta de las Animas. (Probablyseventeenth century.)

n.d. b Arte de la lengua vulgar mexicana de Guatemala: qual se habla enEzcuintla y otros pueblos deste reyno. MS 186, Berendt-Brinton LinguisticCollection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsyl-vania.


Asselbergs, Florine G. L. 2008 Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan: A Nahua

Vision of the Conquest of Guatemala. Boulder: University Press ofColorado.

Boas, Franz1917 El Dialecto Mexicano de Pochutla, Oaxaca. International Journal of

American Linguistics 1:9—44.Campbell, Lyle

1971 Nahua Loan Words in Quichean Languages. Papers from the SixthRegional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 3—13. Chicago: ChicagoLinguistic Society.

1985 The Pipil Language of El Salvador. Berlin: Mouton.1997 American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Canger, Una

1988 Nahuatl Dialectology: A Survey and Some Suggestions. InternationalJournal of American Linguistics 54(1):28—72.

Carochi, Horacio 2001 Grammar of the Mexican Language: With an Explanation of Its Adverbs

(1645). Translated and Edited by James Lockhart. Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press.

Dakin, Karen 1981 The Characteristics of a Nahuatl Lingua Franca. Texas Linguistics Forum

18:55—68.Dakin, Karen, and Cristopher Lutz, eds.

1996 Nuestro pesar, nuestra aflicción = Tunetuliniliz, tucucuca: Memorias enlengua náhuatl enviadas a Felipe II por indígenas del Valle de Guatemalahacia 1572. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Errington, J. Joseph1985 On the Nature of the Sociolinguistic Sign: Describing the Javanese Speech

Levels. In Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspec-tives, edited by Elizabeth Mertz and Richard J. Parmentier, 287—310.Orlando: Academic Press.

Fowler, William R. 1989 The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations: The Pipil-Nicarao

of Central America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Hasler Hangert, Andrés

1987 Hacia una tipología morfológica del náhuatl a partir del dialecto deZacamilola. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superioresen Antropología Social.

2011 El nahua de la Huasteca y el primer mestizaje: Treinta siglos de historianahua a la luz de la dialectología. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones yEstudios Superiores en Antropología Social.

Hill, Jane H., and Kenneth C. Hill1978 Honorific Usage in Modern Nahuatl: The Expression of Social Distance and

Respect in the Nahuatl of the Malinche Volcano Area. Language 54(1):123—55.

Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal2000 Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Regimes of Language:

Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35—83.Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.


Kaufman, Terrence2001 The History of the Nawa Language Group from the Earliest Times to the

Sixteenth Century: Some Initial Results. MS, University of Pittsburgh.Labov, William

2012 Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change. Charlottes-ville: University of Virginia Press.

Lastra de Suárez, Yolanda 1986 Las áreas dialectales del náhuatl moderno. Mexico City: Instituto de

Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma deMéxico.

Lehmann, Walter 1920 Zentral Amerika. Tl. 1: Die Sprachen Zentral-Amerikas in ihren Bezie-

hungen zueinander, sowie zu Süd-Amerika und Mexiko. Berlin: Reimer.León-Portilla, Miguel

1978 Un texto en nahua pipil de Guatemala, siglo XVII. Estudios de culturanáhuatl 13: 35—47.

León-Portilla, Miguel, and Guadalupe Curiel 2011 Cantares Mexicanos. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de

México.Lutz, Christopher

1994 Santiago de Guatemala, 1541—1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experi-ence. Norman: University of Okhlahoma Press.

Matthew, Laura E. 2000 El náhuatl y la identidad mexicana en la Guatemala colonial. Mesoamérica

21:41—68.2012 Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Matthew, Laura E., and Sergio F. Romero

2012 Nahuatl and Pipil in Colonial Guatemala: A Central American Counter-point. Ethnohistory 59(4):765—83.

Maxwell, Judith M., and Robert M. Hill2006 Kaqchikel Chronicles: The Definitive Edition. Austin: University of Texas

Press.Megged, Amos

2013 Nahua Patterns of Colonization in Maya Towns of Guatemala, 1524 to1582: The Indigenous Records. Colonial Latin American Review 22(2):209—34.

Monzón, Cristina 1990 Registro de la variación fonológica en el náhuatl moderno: un estudio de

caso. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores enAntropología Social.

Paredes, Ignacio de1758 Catecismo mexicano, que contiene toda la doctrina christiana con todas sus

declaraciones. Mexico: Imprenta de la Bibliotheca Mexicana.Peralta, V.

1998 Los diferentes registros y subregistros de habla en el náhuatl de Amanalco,Tezcoco, Estado de México. Estudios de cultura náhuatl 28:381—98.

Pittman, Richard S. 1948 Nahuatl Honorifics. International Journal of American Linguistics 14(4):

236—39.


Romero, Sergio F.forthcoming Language and Ethnicity among the K’ichee’ Maya. Provo: University of

Utah Press.Sahagún, Bernardino de

1986 Coloquios y doctrina cristiana: con que los doce frailes de San Francisco,enviados por el papa Adriano VI y por el emperador Carlos V, convirtieron alos indios de la Nueva España: En lengua mexicano y española: Los diálogosde 1524. Mexico City, Universidad Autónoma de México.

2012 General History of the Things of New Spain. Vol. 6: Rhetoric and MoralPhilosophy. Translated with notes by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E.Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Schultze-Jena, Leonhard1935 Indiana. Vol. 2: Mythen in der Muttersprache der Pipil von Izalco in el

Salvador. Jena: Gustav Fischer.Silva-Galeana, L.

1993 El uso de la forma reverencial en náhuatl de Santa Ana Tlacotenco, en elsureste del Distrito Federal. Estudios de cultura náhuatl 28:381—98.

Silverstein, Michael 2003 Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. Language and

Communication 23:193—229.2004 “Cultural” Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus. Current Anthro-

pology 45(5):621—52.Van Akkeren, R.

2005 Conociendo a los Pipiles de la Costa del Pacífico de Guatemala: Un estudioetno-histórico de documentos indígenas y del Archivo General de Centro-américa. In XVIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guate-mala, 2004, Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, edited by JuanPedro Laporte, 1000—1014. Guatemala: Instituto de Antropología e His-toria, Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes.

Grammar, Dialectal Variation, and Honorific Registers in Nahuatl in Seventeenth-Century Guatemala

Documents