| Description |
The Nahuatl language of Mexico, like many other indigenous and minority languages, faces language shift in the face of globalization. The particular historical role of Nahuatl as the language of the Aztec Triple Alliance and as a Mesoamerican lingua franca in the late pre-Columbian and early colonial periods has left an unusually rich documentary history and attracted academic interest. Based on data drawn from the historical record along with observation and fieldwork performed while learning and later teaching Nahuatl, I demonstrate that the relatively common Nahuatl verbal morpheme -ti-, frequently labeled as a 'ligature' or 'connector' in the existing literature, acts as a meaningful functional morpheme in contemporary Eastern Huastecan Nahuatl that serves to index spatial information associated with the predicate. I then consider the ways in which spatial indexing in general is approached by native speaker instructors of Nahuatl as they teach speakers of Indo-European languages, which generally lack comparable structures. From this discussion, I draw suggestions for linguists and languages communities engaged in documentation and language revitalization. |
