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.
[2][full citation needed] That is early Spanish Franciscan missionaries believed mutual comprehension between converter and convertee to be essential to a successful Christianization.
Thanks to the efforts of these early missionaries, there are documented sources of the Classical Nahuatl language dating back to the 1540s, which have enabled a systematic investigation of the changes it has undergone over the centuries under the influence of Spanish.
Through the first few years of language contact, most Spanish influence of Nahuatl consisted in simple lexical borrowings of nouns related to the emergent material exchange between the two cultures.
Incorporation of such borrowed materials into the native language made forced some grammatical alterations to accommodate structures that would not be possible within Classical Nahuatl.
[4][full citation needed] The net effect of such alterations was that “Nahuatl by 1700 or 1720 had become capable in principle of absorbing any Spanish word or construction.
The rest has been done by continued, ever growing cultural pressures, bringing in more words and phrases as the two bodies of speakers became more intertwined and bilingualism increased.”[3][page needed] To be more specific, there has been convergence in word order, level of agglutination, and incorporation of Spanish grammatical particles and discourse markers in Nahuatl speech.
So far this change has only spread to constructions with inanimate possessors, but it may extend further to compete with and displace Classical varieties and complete syntactic convergence.
Such disincorporation of verbal modifiers into periphrastic expressions on analogy with Spanish forms indicates a shift towards a more analytic style characteristic of Hispanic speech.