These encounters brought about an inevitable culture change, more striking in the case of the indigenous world, but significant also in the case of the Europeans. The violent clash of two very advanced civilizations, which had not been in any form of communication before, was followed by a prolonged and uninterrupted process of interaction and exchange.

The research led by Dr. Justyna Olko and her team in Warsaw, Seville and Mexico reconstructs and tries to understand the nature, exact trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural contact and transfers between Europeans and the native people of the Americas. The study focuses on, but is not limited to, the Nahuatl-speaking zone of central Mexico. The meticulous and cross-disciplinary study of an extensive body of texts in Nahuatl (“Aztec”) and Spanish, complemented by present-day ethnolinguistic data, make it possible to deduce and understand patterns across time and space in ways novel to existing scholarship, embracing both micro- and macroregional trends.

Team members document a broad scope of phenomena associated with cross-cultural transfer, recording and analysing in a systematic way attestations of Spanish loanwords, neologisms, semantic changes in traditional vocabulary, calques, as well as morphological, phonological and syntactic changes.  The analysis embraces these same phenomena in sixteenth through eighteenth-century sources and in several selected modern variants of Nahuatl, which have never been compared to the colonial language. An important aim is the correlation of language phenomena with more general contact-induced culture change, including especially evolving forms of political, social and municipal organization in the native world. Such an approach makes it possible to identify and understand factors of cultural and linguistic change; it also allows the team to comprehend processes of cultural continuity in conditions of intense contact.

Breaking existing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities, the project embraces both indigenous and European perspectives. Trends seen in Old and New World encounters will be recognized, adding to the universality of our knowledge of cultural contact worldwide in ways of interest to several disciplines, such as ethnohistory, anthropology, linguistics and philology. The project is carried out together with the scholars and students for whom Nahuatl is the first language as well as with collaborating members from native communities. The methodological innovation of our work transcends the notion of “informants,” seeking an entirely new form of collaboration with native speakers of Nahuatl. Going beyond mainstream research paradigms of “Western science”, an important goal of the project is to enrich it with indigenous research methodologies and ways of generating knowledge.