Nahua peoples

The Nahua are about 2 million people, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Mexico, which have in common besides other cultural aspects of the language, Nahuatl is.

The name is derived from the name of the Nahuatl language, which in turn " good sound, correct pronunciation " itself means. The Aztecs called the speaker of their language Nahuatlaca (singular Nahuatlacatl, from Nahuatl tlacatl " man "), " people who are good, of course speaking ." Today, the Nahua (singular macehualli ), " farmers, simple people ", their language Nahuatl, however, usually refer to as macehualtin as mexicano ( " Mexican" ) or mēxicatlahtōlli ( " language of the Mexica Aztec = ").

There is a group of different Einzelethnien in several states of Mexico, formerly in El Salvador and Guatemala ( Pipil ) and Nicaragua ( Nicarao ).

Among the most famous historical Nahua ethnic groups were among the Aztecs and the Tlaxcalans warring with them.

Historical, mainly due to the Spanish missionary Bernardino de Sahagún ( Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España) returning enumerations of the Nahua tribes are limited usually to the ethnic groups in the Valley of Mexico and the Southern and Eastern neighboring areas, thus speaker of the so called " classical Nahuatl " from which the dialects of Central Nahuatl have emerged today, with about 50,000 speakers. Such historic list, we find, for example, still in the 14th edition of Brockhaus (1895 ), which are not even mentioned specially the Aztecs ( Mexica ) of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco which inhabited: