Nahuatl Nations is a linguistic ethnography that explores the political relations between those Indigenous communities of Mexico that speak the Nahuatl language and the Mexican Nation that claims it as an important national symbol. Author Magnus Pharao Hansen studies how this relation has been shaped by history and how it plays out today in Indigenous Nahua towns, regions, and educational institutions, and in the Mexican diaspora. Based on long-term fieldwork in several Nahuatl speaking communities in Central Mexico, Hansen uses a combination of methods from ethnohistory, sociolinguistics, anthropology and ethnography to study the political importance of Nahuatl in different periods and places, and for different persons. He suggests that the complicated political relations between State, Nation and Nahua communities can be understood through the concept of 'semiotic sovereignty', which refers to a community's ability to manage its own semiotic resources, including its own language, and
