A History of Nahuatl Grammars and Dictionaries

During the three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule, missionaries produced a remarkable body of linguistic work on Nahuatl and other indigenous languages of Mesoamerica. Over this period, friars and grammarians dozens of indigenous language grammars and dictionaries to support the task of communicating with and converting the native population to Christianity. Now they have become some of the most important records we have of how the Nahuatl language looked and sounded during the colonial period, and they are helpful for anyone reading colonial Nahuatl documents today. This page details a brief history of each notable grammar and dictionary from 1547 to the present day.

Andrés de Olmos was born in about 1491 in Burgos, Spain. Around 1511, Andrés joined the order of the Franciscans and then came to the New Spain in 1528, living there until his death in 1571. “He became well versed in the languages of the country, particularly those of the Nahuatl, Totonaca, Huasteca, and Tepehuana, ‘in which he excelled,’ says [Juan de] Torquemada [c. 1562–1624], and in each of which he composed a number of books.” While few of Olmos’ works had been printed, one of his manuscripts, Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana  was discovered and “printed in Paris in 1875, under the direction of the Commission Scientifique, a Grammaire Nahuatl [a Nahuatl grammar].” This is the oldest surviving Nahuatl grammar.

1875 publication of Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana: https://archive.org/details/grammairedelalan00olmouoft/mode/2up

Alonso de Molina (c. 1513-c. 1579) was born in Spain but came to New Spain in 1522, arriving as a young child. Growing up among Nahuatl-speaking children, he became a fluent speaker of the language that benefited him in his work as a Franciscan priest. While Olmos produced the first grammar of an indigenous American language, Molina compiled the first such vocabulary in 1555, expanding it into a second edition in 1571. James Lockhart (1933-2014), a historian of colonial Spanish America wrote, “Molina's Vocabulario is in a class by itself, if only because it was done in the sixteenth century, and other dictionaries have to depend on it.”

1555 Publication of Aquí comiença vn vocabulario enla lengua castellana y mexicana: https://archive.org/details/aquicomienavnvoc00moli/mode/2up

1571 Publication of Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana: https://archive.org/details/vocabularioenlen00moli/mode/2up

Horacio Carochi (c. 1579 or c. 1586–1666) was born in Florence, Italy. He became a Jesuit priest in 1601 and arrived in New Spain in 1605. His Arte de la lengua mexicana con la declaración de los adverbios della, printed in Mexico City in 1645, is one of the most influential grammar of Classical Nahuatl ever published. His grammar directly influenced later foundational works, including Karttunen's Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. In 2002, historian James Lockhart produced the first edition of the Arte, with the original Spanish and an English translation on facing pages, making Carochi's work accessible to English-speaking researchers for the first time.

1645 Publication of Arte de la lengua mexicana: https://archive.org/details/artedelalenguam00caro

(Under copyright) Grammar of the Mexican Language: With an Explanation of its Adverbs (1645): https://www.sup.org/books/latin-american-studies/grammar-mexican-language

Dr. Frances Karttunen (born 1942) is an American linguist who spent over thirty years as Senior Research Scientist at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, retiring in 2000. Her Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl was originally published by the University of Texas Press in 1983 and reprinted by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1992. According to Karttunen's own description of the work, the dictionary draws on previously unused sources, including the Bancroft Library manuscript and the phonologically annotated words published by Carochi, making it the first Nahuatl dictionary to incorporate knowledge of Nahuatl phonology alongside its lexical coverage. For researchers working with colonial Nahuatl records, it remains a foundational modern reference work for English-speaking researchers of Nahuatl. While both editions are under copyright, limited portions of the 1992 edition can be viewed through keyword searches on the Internet Archive

1992 Publication of An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl: https://archive.org/details/analyticaldictio0000kart/mode/2up?q=ic

Dr. Stephanie Wood began the Online Nahuatl Dictionary (OND) project in 2000, publishing it online in its current format in 2012 after years of research and development. The OND contains nearly 39,000 entries, including individual words and phrases. The dictionary was developed with contributions from many graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Oregon, as well as students from the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas. Over the years the project has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Wood has also developed the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs (VLAH), a companion resource that complements the OND by providing visual references for Aztec hieroglyphs.

Online Nahuatl Dictionary https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/

Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs: https://aztecglyphs.wired-humanities.org/

Sybille de Pury and Marc Thouvenot of the Centre d'Études des Langues Indigènes d'Amérique (CELIA-CNRS) developed the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl (GDN) in collaboration with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), publishing it online in its current format in 2012. The GDN brings together about twenty dictionaries on the Nahuatl language spanning four centuries of the language's history, from 1547 to the early 2000s, allowing a single word to be traced across multiple centuries of usage. Researchers should be aware that the GDN interface and translations are presented in Spanish and French, rather than English.

Gran Diccionario Náhuatl: https://gdn.iib.unam.mx/

Image: Cover of dictionary by Molina - Vocabulary en lengua castellana y mexicana (1571) by Alonso de Molina (d. 1579)., Wikimedia Commons, (https://commons.wikimedia.org : accessed 9 October 2026). This image is in the public domain in the United States.