The Aztecs spoke a version of the language called Nahuatl. Nahuatl belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of Amerindian languages, which also includes the languages of the Shoshone, Comanche, Pima, and Tohono O'ohdam tribes in the present-day United States. When the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, there were already many Nahuatl-speaking groups. There were also people who spoke other languages, such as Otomi, Tarascan, and Totonac.

In the twenty-first century about 1.5 million people in Mexico speak Nahuatl; it is the most widely spoken native language. Though almost all Mexicans speak Spanish, more than five million Mexicans use an Amerindian language in daily life. Besides Nahuatl, those languages include Mayan, Mixtec, Otomi, Tarascan, and Zapotec.

When the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, there were already forms of Mesoamerican writing in the area, which they adopted along with other elements of the culture. The Aztec form of writing entailed making pictures as symbols or glyphs, which represented a word or idea. Most of their glyphs were actually illustrations of the word they meant to convey. For example, the glyph for war was a picture of a war club and shield. The glyph for tree was the picture of a tree. The Aztecs had some glyphs representing sounds or syllables, and these could be put together to form the name of a place. They also had a few glyphs that were not illustrations, but stood for ideas or words. The Aztec writing system never reproduced the full spoken language like that of the Maya.

The Aztecs generally did their writing in books called codices (plural of codex). Inside a codex was a very long sheet of paper that had been folded in an accordion-like fashion. The paper was usually made from the bark of fig trees, which was treated with lime and then pounded into a pulp. The pulp was then flattened into thin sheets of paper. Huge quantities of paper were often required as tribute payments from conquered lands in the empire. Strips of paper, sometimes 30 feet (9 meters) long, were glued to wooden book covers. The pages of the codex were marked off by lines and then folded like a fan. The writing and pictures covering both sides of each page were read from the top to the bottom.

Common people in the Aztec empire were not taught how to read or write in school. Most reading and writing in Tenochtitlan and other cities was done by professional scribes who were highly skilled in drawing and interpreting the glyphs. When they used glyphs to write on a page, the scribes did not arrange them in the order the reader would read them, but in patterns that would have significance only to a professional reader.

For keeping records and recording the movements of the stars, this writing system functioned fairly well. For telling the history or stories of the empire, however, the system relied on the memory of the person telling the story, as in the old method of relaying oral traditions. The person reading the page would already have committed its contents to memory, but he was able to use the glyphs and pictures to jog his memory as he related the page's meaning.

The Aztec rulers relied heavily on their writing system to manage their empire. The system was extremely useful as a means to record numbers, dates, places, names of people, and many other concepts. Scribes recorded the collection of taxes and the legal proceedings of the Aztec courts. The social units called calpulli, groups of families who shared land, kept track of their holdings with land titles and maps. The pochteca (merchants) recorded their sales and profits. The Aztec priests relied heavily on books in their observations of the stars and calendar systems. Each temple had a full library of codices with astronomical observations and notes about the movements of the planets and stars.

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