Grammar, Dialectal Variation, and Honorific Registers in Nahuatl in Seventeenth-Century Guatemala

This article examines honorific registers in Central Mexican and Guatemalan varieties of Nahuatl in seventeenth-century Guatemala, highlighting the importance of sociolinguistic methods for the dialectology of Mesoamerican languages. A comparative study of two pastoral texts reveals that the differences between the honorific registers of the Nahuatl varieties were quantitative rather than categorical: the structure of honorifics is the same (for all syntactic categories), but significant differences appear in the frequency of honorific marking, especially on verbs. Metalinguistic comments in Spanish sources provide evidence of the impact of these differences on stylistic marking, ethnic boundary work, and indexing of social status.