1741: Nahuatl in Tagalog Sep 20, 2019

Tagalog has a lot of loanwords, discussed yesterday; around 49% of their vocabulary is of non-native origins. Some sources seem obvious, like Spanish (13%) and American English (7%) as they were recently colonial powers for The Philippines, as well as Chinese (7%) as there has long been a Chinese presence in the islands. However, Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs makes up a larger 10% of the lexical makeup of modern Tagalog. This may seem surprising, especially considering that they are the total length of the Pacific Ocean apart, but this happened two ways. First, Aztecs were brought over from New Spain before Mexican independence, but also some words were pick up by Spaniards themselves. In any other Asian or Pacific language, even one Indigenous American word can be rare that it has led aided research about trans-Pacific migration patterns.

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