Nahuatl–Spanish contact
Nahuatl has been in intense contact with Spanish since the Spanish conquest of 1521. Since that time, there have been a large number of Spanish loanwords introduced to the language, loans which span from nouns and verbs to adjectives and particles. Syntactical constructions have also been borrowed into Nahuatl from Spanish, through which the latter language has exerted typological pressure on the form such that Nahuatl and Spanish are exhibiting syntactic and typological convergence. Today, hardly any Nahuatl monolinguals remain, and the language has undergone extreme shift to Spanish, such that some consider it be on the way to extinction. The Nahuatl and Spanish languages have coexisted in stable contact for over 500 years in central Mexico. This long, well-documented period of contact provides some of the best linguistic evidence for contact-induced grammatical change. That is to say, Spanish seems to have exerted a profound influence on the Nahuatl language, but despite the extreme duration of their contact Nahuatl has only recently begun to show signs of language shift. This shift is progressing at a startling rate. Though Nahuatl still has over a million speakers, it is considered by some linguists to be endangered and on the way to extinction.