Introduction
It has been around a while. It has 11 branches that have smaller branches. This family has unique features. It has a writing system. Where is it spoken? What about the people that speak these languages? How many people speak these languages of this family today?
History
This language family started in Arizona and surrounding regions 5,000 years ago. Or it started in central Mexico 5,600 years ago and came into the U.S. from there. The Aztecs said they came from a place called Aztlan. They were with 7 tribes, then they left those tribes and followed a bird. Where it landed it, they set up camp.
It's rather Unique
Parts of Speech: It has nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Syntax: It's word order is subject, object and verb.
Morphology: It has a lot of prefixes and suffixes for verbs.
Phonology: It has 5 vowels and sum vowels have different ways of pronouncing them. It has the least amount of consonant sounds of any Mesoamerican language families.
Branches
Aztecan: Nahuatl has the most speakers and dialects. It the only one with a script. .
Cahita: It is 2 languages spoken in Northern Mexico.
Corachol: It has 2 languages and one of them have 2 dialects.
Hopi: 1 language with 4 dialects and 7,000 speakers.
Numic: 7 languages spoken by less than 3,000 people.
Opatan: It was 2 languages that may have died out in 1930.
Takic: 2 languages and each one has 3 dialects.
Taracahitan: It has 3 languages.
Tepiman: It has 4 languages.
Tubar: Only a few speakers if any and it was hard to classify.
Tubatulabal: It went out style about 2 decades ago.
Script
The Aztecs had their own wring system. Their writing was pictographic and ideographic. It was based on the Zapotec script. Their number system was 20 based. After the Spanish took ova, this script was destroyed. And they destroyed libraries too, because they were foolish Catholics.
Distribution
This language family is spoken throughout North America. It went extinct in sum countries in Central America. But in El Salvador it's coming back! There are speakers of these language in 7 states in the U.S. It's also spoken in 15 states in Mexico and Mexico City.
Speakers
I wrote about sum of the peoples that speak languages within this family.
Hopi: Click here to learn about them.
Northern Paiute: They were seminomadic and lived in California, Oregon, and Nevada. They became sedentary, so they could deal with the Europeans. Shamanism was a big deal to them. There are many bands (groups) of them. Their names based on what they eat.
Southern Paiute: They were peaceful with the tribes they lived around, until 1850. The Navajo raided their land and kidnapped women and children 4 slavery. Mormons and sliver miners stole their land in the 1860s. They created a sweet tea out of chokecherries.
Ute: They traded with tribes for blankets. They rode horses and raided other tribes. During the raids women and children were kidnaped and traded for Spanish goods. Mormons stole their land. They were animists and had vision quests. Some of them are members of the Native American Church. 300 different plants were used to heal.
Huichol: They live on farms and hamlets. Their marriages are arranged and they eat blue, red, yellow, white corn. They practice their traditional religion, which has a corn, deer, eagle, peyote, rain, and sun deities. They eat peyote to commune with the spirits; and make great paintings.
Aztecs: They ruled most of Mexico, until the Spanish took ova. There were 3 castes in their society. They are as follows: nobility, workers and commoners. 20% of society were farmers and the rest were warriors, artists and traders. The upper class were monotheistic and the lower class was polytheistic. They were big on human sacrifice. They ripped out people hearts on the tops of pyramids. This prevented the Sun from getting stuck in the underworld, they believed.
Modern Time
Nahuatl has ova 1 million speakers. Sum of the languages are being learned today. While others are extinct. There are linguists recording some of these languages because they are endanger of going extinct. They will digitalize the info, so future generations can study these languages.
References
https://www.indigenousmexico.org/articles/the-origin-of-nhuatl-and-the-uto-aztecan-family
wikipedia.org
duckduckgo.com
https://www.native-languages.org/famuto.htm
https://www.mayabridge.org/post/an-introduction-to-uto-aztecan-languages
https://www.academia.edu/35118475/Uto_Aztecan
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Uto-Aztecan-languages
https://languagesgulper.com/eng/Utoaztecan.html
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18159
