Language Families
Uto-Aztecan
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The family of Nahuatl, Hopi, Comanche, Wixarika and some sixty other languages, running from Oregon to central Mexico. It joins the Pueblo southwest to the Valley of Mexico in one lineage, which is why the direction of its spread has been argued over for a century.
Facts
Disputed
Homeland HypothesisEither the Great Basin, with the spread running south, or northwest Mexico, with it running north. 1 Lyle Campbell's standard reference on Native American historical linguistics records two opposed accounts of Uto-Aztecan's homeland and direction of spread, argued mainly among specialists in Uto-Aztecan historical linguistics and archaeology since the mid-twentieth century. One places the homeland in the Great Basin of the western United States, with speakers later moving south into Mexico; the other places it in northwest Mexico, with speakers moving north into the Great Basin and the American Southwest. The direction matters beyond geography because it bears directly on the history of maize agriculture in North America: if the spread ran south, Uto-Aztecan speakers carried a hunter-gatherer economy into Mesoamerica and took up maize farming after arriving there from neighbouring farming peoples, while if it ran north, Uto-Aztecan speakers were already agricultural in Mexico and carried maize farming northward with them as they spread. Uto-Aztecan counts the Native American Church among the peoples speaking its languages, but the dispute recorded here is about population movement and agricultural history, not about any daughter tradition's own ceremonial practice. Neither direction can be independently confirmed because the same reconstructed vocabulary for maize and cultivation is compatible with either story, borrowed words look similar to inherited ones at this range, and the linguistic evidence alone cannot distinguish which population originated the connection. Attestation
Earliest AttestationNahuatl, written in the Latin alphabet from soon after the Spanish conquest and, before that, in the pictorial and partly phonetic writing of the codices. The northern languages of the family have no record before the nineteenth century. 1 Status
Classification StatusEstablished, reaching from the Great Basin to central Mexico. Whether it divides into a northern and a southern half, or into a larger number of branches with no such split, is argued. 1 Learn More
From Oregon to the Valley of Mexico
Uto-Aztecan runs the length of western North America, from Northern Paiute in Oregon down through Shoshone, Comanche and Hopi to Wixarika, Raramuri and Nahuatl in Mexico. Around sixty languages are counted, and the family is securely established. It joins peoples whose ways of life differed as much as any on the continent, from Great Basin foragers to the urban civilisation of the Valley of Mexico, in a single lineage, and the direction in which it spread has been argued over for a century. One account has the family originating in the Great Basin and moving south, the other has it originating in northwest Mexico and moving north with maize agriculture.
The stakes are not narrowly linguistic: the answer bears on whether farming spread through the southwest by migration or by adoption, which is one of the central questions of North American archaeology. Hopi is the outlier in more than geography. It is spoken in the Pueblo southwest among neighbours from three unrelated families, which is a reminder that a language family is not a culture area and that peoples who share a way of life need not share an ancestor. The reverse holds too. Comanche and Nahuatl belong to one family and their speakers shared almost nothing: a mounted plains people of the southern United States and the urban population of the largest city in the pre-conquest Americas. A family tree records descent of speech and nothing else, and reading it as a chart of cultural affinity is the commonest mistake made with these entries.
Nahuatl, Peyote and Two Kinds of Survival
Classical Nahuatl is the language of the largest body of indigenous religious material recorded anywhere in the Americas. Almost all of it was written down after the conquest, in the Latin alphabet, largely under the direction of Franciscan friars, and the greatest of those compilations is the Florentine Codex assembled by Bernardino de Sahagun with Nahua collaborators over decades. That provenance has to be stated with every use of it: the material is genuinely Nahua in language and in informant, and it was collected by a missionary order in order to understand a religion it intended to replace. Both things are true at once, and reading it well means holding both. Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people.
Further north in the same family, the Wixarika and the Raramuri maintain ceremonial life centred in part on peyote, and the Wixarika pilgrimage to Wirikuta is a living practice with its own custodians rather than a survival of anything. Peyote religion also reached Uto-Aztecan speakers of the United States and became part of the Native American Church. These are living traditions with people responsible for them, and the atlas describes them rather than instructing anyone in them.
Sources Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble with Peyote Religion: A HistoryOmer C. Stewart
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The tradition's liturgical, scriptural or ancestral language belongs to this family.
The tradition's liturgical, scriptural or ancestral language belongs to this family.
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