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Three major language families, Mixe-Zoque, Totonac, and Mayan, are composed of languages spoken only by Mesoamerican peoples (Campbell 1976). Another major family, Oto-Manguean, includes some languages in neighboring parts of Central America. Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica of central Mexico, is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family extending through northern Mexico into North America. Smaller numbers of people in Mesoamerica spoke apparently isolated languages: Huave, Tarascan, and Xincan. On the southern boundary of Mesoamerica, the Lencan language family is now recognized as the northernmost outlier of a South American language family (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Distribution of languages within Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest.

Each of the language families named is historically independent, as distinct from each other as German is from Mandarin. Linguists note that despite a lack of common roots, a variety of shared features are found in languages whose speakers formed Mesoamerican societies. These features are found in Nahuatl but not in its close northern Mexican relatives, illustrating their origin not in the development of the broader language family but through interaction among speakers of the languages. Because they are found only in these languages, these features must have developed historically in the region. Because the features are found in unrelated languages, they must result from intensive contact between speakers of different languages.

These patterns have been used to define a Mesoamerican linguistic area: a zone in which, through intensive interaction, speakers of unrelated languages adopted common linguistic features (Campbell 1976; Campbell et al. 1986). Historical linguistic studies suggest that the Mesoamerican language area had taken its present form before 1000 BCE, when a series of loan words for important cultural concepts spread throughout Mesoamerica, apparently from a Mixe-Zoque source language, at the same time that Gulf Coast Olmec sites were engaged in intensive long-distance trade for jade, obsidian, and other valuables (Campbell and Kaufman 1976).

Mesoamerican languages share features of grammar, sounds (phonology), and meaning (semantics). Grammatical and semantic features directly reflect the shared practices of the Mesoamerican tradition. Number systems based on 20, and numeral classifiers, special forms used in counting different categories of things, are widely shared traces of the use of common calendars and mathematics. Shared phonological features mean that Mesoamerican languages sound similar to each other, even when unrelated. This suggests that speakers of different languages adapted to each other’s manner of speech.

Poetic aspects of speech are also found in unrelated Mesoamerican languages. Shared poetics hint at the ceremonious and ritual contexts within which cross-language communication would have been most likely, as guests were entertained during social, political, and religious events. Mesoamerican formal speech typically employs metaphors arranged in paired couplets. Many of the specific metaphors are shared by unrelated Mesoamerican languages. Words for locations are often derived from parts of the body, for example the word “stomach” meaning “inside.” Common figures of speech like calling the door of a building its “mouth,” the bark of a tree its “skin,” and the eye of a person the “seed of the face” can be related to conventions of visual representation. For example, on some Classic Maya temples, the doorway is marked as the mouth of an animal by architectural sculpture.

The way independent, unrelated languages grow to resemble each other is via a historical processes of mutual translation. The process through which colonial speakers of Yucatec and Spanish clerics together created a new form of the Mayan Yucatec language is a colonial example (Hanks 2010). This documented historical process provides a model for thinking about the situations in which a Mesoamerican linguistic area could have emerged. Given the diversity of different languages spoken within a relatively restricted area, it is likely that many Mesoamerican people learned and spoke multiple languages. The Mesoamerican people pressed into service as interpreters for the first Spanish invaders certainly were fluent in multiple unrelated languages. For Mesoamerican people from one region who traveled to or lived in other areas, like the foreigners living in distinct neighborhoods in Teotihuacan (Chapters 4 and 5), multilingualism would have been the norm.

Nor was multilingualism limited to large cities. From the earliest periods for which archaeological evidence is available, opportunities for interaction across linguistic boundaries would have been created as people sought materials only to be found in places within Mesoamerica’s complex geography occupied by speakers of other languages. Gulf Coast Olmecs, understood to have spoken Mixe-Zoque languages, needed to communicate with speakers of Maya languages, and possibly of Lenca or Xinca, to obtain jade from Guatemala. Mesoamerica, as a product of histories of shared practices, including practices of language, was shaped as well by the distribution of resources in geographic space.