After other groups began to settle around and within it, the Matlatzinca territory became an important hub of economic activity.

As Franciscan orders began arriving in the territory and evangelizing to the natives, missionaries were forced to learn the languages and create grammars.

In 1565 before epidemics ravaged the native populations of New Spain, it was estimated that there were perhaps 180,000 people who spoke Matlatzinca.

There is the tendency to drop word-final vowels if it occurs after a voiceless stop or affricate.

[7] For example, /i/ may get left off the end of a word if it is unstressed and appears after a voiceless consonant.

Some other tendencies are that the tone of the syllable will be drawn towards the one that follows it, such as in tuko:ti mbaʔni "She shut the house".

Finally, a falling glide may occur at the final syllable of a word, such as in [8] Here are examples of only some of the phonological processes that occur in Matlatzinca: The stem frequently takes a few different forms such as CV, CVC, CVV, CVVC, and CVʰCVC.

[9] Verbs include affixes for time-aspect-mode, voice, and the number of subject and object arguments.

This can be seen in the word ki-ro-nnəʰə ne-ʃuwi, meaning “the women dance,” where ron- indicates the third person accusative.

As seen in both the previous examples, the morpheme ki is used in most verb constructions, but its meaning and function is not very clear.

It appears with morphemes concerning time-aspect-mode, generally preceding the verb, but it does not come before determinant phrases, adjectives, adverbs, or prepositions.

Motijo proposes that the morpheme ʔin is a determiner that indicates a noun, as seen in the word ʔimbaani, meaning "house."

[9] Based on data provided by Escalante and Hernández,[3] Matlatzinca utilizes an SVO word order just as English does.

For example, However, if there is not a direct object present, the sentence can take the order VS or SV.

There is also a small class of verbs that follow an active-stative alignment, but there is not enough in the existing corpus to infer the general difference for when each case is used.