Translating the divine: culture contact and language planning from within in a sixteenth-century Nahuatl dictionary

Abstract

Most often, cultural and linguistic contact occurs amongst populations who coexist over long periods of time, sharing cultural, technological, and linguistic traits. Nevertheless, in some cases, two groups with virtually no knowledge of each other come into sudden and intensive contact. Such situations occurred with particular frequency during the age of European colonial expansion. One of the earliest and best documented episodes was the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Triple Alliance. In 1521, the Spanish conquistadors and indigenous Mexican soldiers, under the command of Hernán Cortés, captured Tenochtitlan; as a consequence, the Spanish Crown gained control over vast territories and millions of inhabitants of central Mexico. This occurred merely three years after the first encounter between the two cultures, which took place during Juan de Grijalva’s expedition in 1518. The consequences for the inhabitants of what had become New Spain were overwhelming and the following decades and centuries saw changes to all aspects of life, reflected, naturally, in the local languages. Throughout most of the colonial period, Nahuatl continued to act as a lingua franca for the multilingual population of central Mexico (Olko and Sullivan 2013, 188–90). It also gained a new medium of use in the form of alphabetic writing, which was quickly adopted by the Nahua people for their own purposes (Olko 2014). Language change in early colonial Nahuatl, triggered by contact with the Spaniards and their culture and language, encompassed lexical borrowing, neosemantization, and the coining of new terms. Later in the colonial period, grammatical changes occurred as a result of increasing bilingualism in Spanish and Nahuatl (Lockhart 1992, 261–325). With some important exceptions, changes to everyday life and language use were not immediate. According to Lockhart (idem, 261), the first generation of indigenous Mexicans following the conquest had little contact with Spaniards and generally continued to live as they used to. The situation was different for the elite, who played the role of intermediaries between the Spanish authorities and the wider population (idem, 30–40), and often sent their children to European-style educational institutions (Gonzalbo Aizpuru 1990, 25–41). The pupils and alumni of these institutions were, during the first decades after the conquest, among the only Nahuas familiar with Spanish. The area of life in which changes occurred most rapidly was religion. The imperative to Christianize the inhabitants of the newly established colonies was, within the