⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-17 - Repairs are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

Some of our more complex, multi-field searches (such as the search field on our homepage and Search All Fields) are currently under repair and may not work as expected.

Thank you to all our users who emailed to alert us to the problem! We hope to have it repaired soon.

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

nican.

Headword: 
nican.
Principal English Translation: 

here, around here (see Molina and Karttunen); local, indigenous

IPAspelling: 
nikɑːn
Alonso de Molina: 

nican. aqui, aca, de aqui, o por aqui. aduer.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 71v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

NICĀN here / aquí, acá, de aquí, o por aquí (M) See -CĀN.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 172.

Horacio Carochi / English: 

nicān = here
Horacio Carochi, S.J., Grammar of the Mexican language with an explanation of its adverbs (1645), translated and edited with commentary by James Lockhart, UCLA Latin American Studies Volume 89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2001), 507.

Andrés de Olmos: 

Nican, vel iz, aqui, de aqui, aca, por aqui, etc.
Andrés de Olmos, Arte para aprender la lengua Mexicana, ed. Rémi Siméon, facsimile edition ed. Miguel León-Portilla (Guadalajara: Edmundo Aviña Levy, 1972), 188.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written: 

particle. nicān tlācatl, a person from here, a local person, an indigenous person; mainly seen in the plural (227)
James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 227.

Attestations from sources in English: 

yntla nicantlacatl ma momaca macuilpoualli yc mecauitecoz yhoan totocoz ynnipa in altepetl matlactli leguas noviampan ce xiuitl = If it is a local person let him be given a hundred lashes and be exiled from the city and the surrounding ten leagues for one year (Coyoacan, 1557)
Beyond the Codices, eds. Arthur J.O. Anderson, Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1976), Doc. 35, 218–219.

in iuh mochichioa nican tlaca = as the local people do
James Lockhart, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, Repertorium Columbianum v. 1 (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1993), 232.

ce thlacatl ytoca haloso y nican itoca piviyol ya chicuicnavhxivhtl = The first is named Alonso; his local name is Pihuiyol, now nine years old.
(Cuernavaca region, ca. 1540s)
The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Censuses from Morelos, ed. and transl. S. L. Cline, (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1993), 120–121.

nican tlacatl = a person from here, a local person; an indigenous person

nican tlaca, nicantlaca = local people; we people here; indigenous people

nican iz = through here, pass by here; this way

huel nican = right here

themes: 
Race, Ethnicity, Identity