Nahuatl Language Interpreters and Translators

The Nahuatl Language Interpreters and Translators

CIT offers Nahuatl interpreters and translators with legal, medical and specialty experience, including criminal and civil matters, employee meetings, engineering, patent cases, labor disputes, immigration and more.

Although based in Los Angeles, CIT offers comprehensive Nahuatl language services including interpretation, translation, and transcription, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worldwide. Our interpreters and translators are native speakers who have been screened, certified, have provided credentials, field-tested, and kept up to date with developments in both English and the Nahuatl language through means such as lectures, conferences, and travel. CIT’s Nahuatl language interpreters and translators possess in-depth knowledge of the Nahuatl language, as well as of the culture and history of the Nahuatl people, allowing them to provide informed and complete interpretation and translation.

The Nahuatl Language

The Nahuatl language is a Uto-Aztecan language and is spoken by about 1.5 million people in Mexico. The majority of the Nahuatl speakers in Mexico live in Central Mexico, specifically in Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosi, Guerrero, Mexico (the state), El Distrito Federal, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Oaxaca and in El Salvador. There are also Nahuatl speakers in parts of Mexico and the US but much smaller. Nahuatl is thought to be the most important of the Uto-Aztecan languages and was the language of the Aztec and Toltec people.

There are several dialects of Nahuatl, although many of them are quite similar and can be understood within dialects. Most younger Nahuatl speakers also speak Spanish. Historically speaking, Classical Nahuatl was used in the Aztec empire and was a lingua franca in most of Mesoamerica beginning in the 600s until about the 1500s. The modern dialects of Nahuatl are most similar to the Classical Nahuatl dialect.

Original Nahuatl script was written in a pictographic script. Although not a complete writing system, it was used as a mnemonic which reminded its readers about the texts they had learned orally. This script was used carved in stone and in many picture books that the Spanish had unfortunately destroyed. It was the Spanish that had introduced Latin script to write Nahuatl. Since then, a lot of literature, particularly poetry and prose, has been written in Latin script. It is also because of this that many do not know how Nahuatl is actually spelled.

In the Nahuatl script, the letters b,d,g,f, ñ, and rr are used only in Spanish loanwords. In Classical Nahuatl, the tl sound is notable as it is made to be one single consonant and has a glottal stop. In modern dialects, there is no glottal stop and has been replaced bu the letter h. This sound, however, is used to differentiate between three modern dialects. They are the central and northern Aztect, which used the tl sound and can be seen in the word Nahuatl. The Eastern Aztec dialects do not use the tl, rather simply the t is used., referring to the language as Nahuat. Western dialects replaced the tl with only the l and refer to the language as Nahual. The Classical Nahuatl language from around the 1500s had used 15 consonants and 4 long and short vowels.