54 GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES Book I. 
Orotinans should be found to exist in the government of 
Guanacaste, disputed between Nicaragua and Costarica. 
Another supposition, however, may be made to distribute 
the three languages amongst the four nations. The Cho- 
lutecans may have spoken an Aztec dialect, and thus have 
had their language in common with the Niquirans. Ac- 
cording to Sahagun, one of the seven tribes of the 
Nahuatlacs, who all spoke the Aztec language, were called 
the Chololtecas, a word which, in its original Aztec form, 
was Chololtecatl, meaning a native of Cholola. If, then, 
the Cholutecans of the region around the Gulf of Fonseca 
should have been a branch or fragment of the Chololtecas 
of Mexico, the name being merely modified by the vicious 
pronunciation of the other Nicaraguan tribes, they must 
have spoken the Aztec language ; which is to say that 
they spoke the same language with the Niquirans or 
true Nicaraguans. The wide distribution of geographical 
names derived from the Aztec language, which are found 
spread over the northern section of Nicaragua, seems to 
corroborate this opinion. There is, however, a circum- 
stance contradictory to it. The old historians have a third 
form of what is apparently the same word. It is the name 
of the Chorotegans. According to Herrera, the " Cholu- 
tecans" were a noble caste of the " Chorotegans." The 
latter word, therefore, was a more comprehensive denomi- 
nation than the former, and it was sometimes used for all 
the four nations above mentioned. Oviedo, on the other 
hand, uses the two names of Dirians and Chorotegans 
indiscriminately for the same nation, whose language is 
sufficiently known to prove that it has no affinity with the 
Aztec. From these facts it would appear that the name 
of the Chorotegans must have been used in more than one 
sense, but which had nothing to do with the affinity of 
