The Nahuatl Indigenous Language to be Taught at Columbia

Monday, November 28, 2016

Starting January 2017 Columbia will teach an Indigenous language for the first time: Nahuatl.

Nahuatl has been spoken in Mexico since at least the seventh century and was the language of the Aztecs. Nahuatl based languages are spoken mostly in rural areas throughout central Mexico and along the coastline. It is estimated that there are currently 1.5 million native Nahuatl speakers. 

The course will be taught by Angel Vicente Ferrer, a native Nahua speaker of the Tepeteno Tlataluquitepec community in Puebla. Ferrer is a PhD student in American Indian Linguistics at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS- Mexico City). He has taught Nahuatl language courses at Puebla Autonomous University’s Faculty of Arts (BUAP), where he collaborated in the project titled “Linguistic Communities in the City of Puebla,” coordinated by the Linguistics Academic Body. In 2013 he participated in the “Nahua Dialectology” project coordinated by the National Institute of Indigenous Languages in Mexico (INALI).

The course will be taught Thursdays and Fridays, 10:10-11:25 am.

Click here to learn more.