In this presentation, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Sergio Romero will, first, describe the vast and diverse documentary production in Nahuatl from colonial Guatemala. Based on the preliminary analysis of Spanish sources and the form and content of Nahuatl manuscripts preserved in archives in Guatemala, Spain and the United States, he will then make a few remarks on the sociolinguistic history of contact in the Mayan highlands and Pacific piedmont until the arrival of the Spanish and their Mexican allies in 1523. He will focus on the relation between the lineage, the calpolli and the post-Classic speech community; the social role of dialectal variation among the highland Maya and the Nahua; the extent of language contact between Nahuatl, on the one hand, and Xinkan and highland Mayan languages, on the other; and the cultural influence of Nahuatl speakers on the highland Maya. Finally, he will address the relevance of the Nahuatl corpus to resolve some of the conundrums of highland Maya history, in particular the chronology of Nahua migrations and their cultural and political impact. The presentation seeks to lay out a tentative social framework to theorize language contact in the Maya highlands and Pacific piedmont before the social dislocation provoked by the Spanish conquest.
