Spanish arrived in Mexico with Hernán Cortés and the conquistadors in 1519, rapidly supplanting the dominant Nahuatl language of the Aztec Empire as the language of administration, religion, and commerce. Contact with Nahuatl and dozens of other indigenous languages — including Maya, Zapotec, and Mixtec — left a lasting imprint on Mexican Spanish, contributing everyday words such as chocolate, tomate, aguacate, and chile. The colonial period also introduced significant numbers of African-born enslaved people, whose languages added further layers to regional dialects, particularly along the Gulf Coast. Following independence in 1821, Mexican intellectuals debated whether to cultivate a distinct national language, but Spanish remained the official tongue while indigenous languages were gradually marginalized. Today Mexico has the largest Spanish-speaking population in the world — approximately 130 million people — and its variety of Spanish is characterized by relatively conservative vowel pronunciation and a rich substrate of Nahuatl loanwords.
