Doña Marina and Cortés

Doña Marina's utility to Cortés was her multilingualism. When given to him, she spoke both Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica and many other peoples of central Mexico, and Maya, the language of the peoples of the Yucatán Peninsula. Moreover, she knew the conventions of a register of Nahuatl called tecpillatolli (lordly speech), a difficult and indirect rhetorical style used among the Nahuatl-speaking elite. Need research paper done? Buy Research paper writing services! Educated writers deliver customized research papers! Without these special skills, she would have been unable to negotiate successfully for Cortés or counsel him about the intentions of the people with whom he was dealing.
Her command of tecpillatolli supports the assertions of López de Gómara and Díaz del Castillo that doña Marina's parents had been Nahuatl-speaking rulers of a city in the area of the present-day state of Tabasco — geographically far from Tenochtitlan, the Mexica's center in the Mexican central highlands, but sharing a common language with the Mexica. A child of Nahua nobility would have received rigorous education in polite speech and proper deportment, but because of the closely guarded life of daughters of noble families, a girl would not have had occasion to become bilingual. This atypical capability of doña Marina had come about through her passing, while still very young, into the hands of Maya in the area east of her original home. Sources differ about whether she was stolen or was given away by her parents. In any case, by the time the Chontal Maya presented her to Cortés, she apparently had acquired the competence of a childhood Nahuatl-Maya bilingual.
Cortés had rescued a Spaniard, Jerónimo de Aguilar, from the northeast coast of Yucatán, where, after surviving a shipwreck, he had been immersed in Maya language and culture for several years. Aguilar served as Maya interpreter for Cortés but knew none of the languages the Spaniards encountered after they left the Yucatán Peninsula. On the Veracruz coast doña Marina revealed her bilingualism and the fact that communities throughout Mesoamerica either were Nahuatl speaking or employed Nahuatl-language interpreters (nahuatlatos). Because of this, she was able to interpret wherever they went, translating into Maya for Aguilar, who translated to Spanish for Cortés and then translated Cortés's Spanish to Maya for doña Marina. In the course of the Conquest years, doña Marina herself acquired Spanish and on the Honduras expedition functioned without Aguilar, interpreting between Spanish and both Nahuatl and Maya, each in numerous regional varieties. Her services were valued highly by both sides according to López de Gómara, Díaz del Castillo, and the authors of various reports to the Spanish Crown.