Abstract
The hard labour put into the first alphabetic registries by the Spanish friars during the years following the Conquest was of a great linguistic value. Up to that point, Nahuatl had been a language which was depicted rather than written, and the first missionaries who arrived in New Spain during the 16th Century had to put great effort into coding it, to classify and syntactically describe a language derived from an unknown linguistic trunk. This way, through reading and writing in their own languages, notorious works of linguistic character arose, such as the Cartilla para enseñar a leer by friar Pedro de Gante, the first book on alphabetizing published in America; the Arte de la lengua mexicana by friar Andrés de Olmos; the Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana by friar Alonso de Molina, and some others. To sum up, the importance of these syllabaries, arts and vocabularies in the alphabetization and castilianization of the indigenous people of New Spain is indisputable.