Used in the southwestern United States, this is the only North American Indian language spoken by a growing number of people. Because it is very different from European and Asian languages, the U.S. Marine Corps used it during World War II to encode secret messages. The Aztecs used this language, still spoken by 800,000 Mexicans, at the time Cortes conquered them. The Arawak Indians of the island Columbus called San Salvador spoke this language. The people who spoke this language of eastern Mexico and northern Belize had a fully developed system of writing based on hieroglyphics, which have not yet been deciphered.
Spanish conquerors spread it to other tribes.
It is still the most widely spoken South American language. Men and women use very different vocabularies in this South American language. The Indians say a tribe invaded these islands, killed off the men, and married the women. The women kept many words from their original language, while the men continued to use their own language. It is a tonal language, like Chinese.