⚠ 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.

tlahuanqui.

Headword: 
tlahuanqui.
Principal English Translation: 

a drunk, a drunkard; drunk, intoxicated (see Molina and Karttunen)

Orthographic Variants: 
tlauanqui, tlavanqui
IPAspelling: 
tɬɑːwɑːnki
Alonso de Molina: 

tlauanqui. borracho, o beodo assi.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 143v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

TLĀHUĀNQUI drunkard / borracho o beodo así (M) See TLĀHUĀN(A).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 268.

Attestations from sources in English: 

See an image that represents tlahuanqui in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).

ipanpa yn tlavanque = about the drunks (Tlaxcala, 1547)
Beyond the Codices, eds. Arthur J.O. Anderson, Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1976), Doc. 22, 118–119.

ça iuhquin tlavāque = [the Mexica] seemed to be intoxicated
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), 214.
Plurals: tlahuanque, tlauanque, tlavanque.

The adjective tlāhuanqui (drunk) derives from the verb in the preterite form with -qui, "the post-consonantal variant of the participial suffix." Similar formations are micqui, dead, and cualānqui, angry.
Michel Launey, An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, translated and adapted by Christopher MacKay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 159.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

anmo ma octli quique yn quitova iva yolque tlavanque amon neli = no tomaron vino dicen sus parientes. Se embriagaron no es verdad? (Tlaxcala, 1562)
Catálogo de documentos escritos en Náhuatl, siglo XVI, vol. I (México, Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, 2013), 12.

Cuix otictlahuancauh in Missa? = Dexaste por borrachera la Missa? (s. XVII)
Antonio Vázquez Gastelu, Arte de lengua mexicana (Puebla de los Angeles, México: Imprenta Nueva de Diego Fernández de León, 1689), 35r.