Is there any relationship or interaction between the Mayan and Nahuatl languages?, and if so, what is the scholarship on that subject like?

by Turnshroud
limetom

The various extant and historically attested Mayan languages belong to the Mayan language family, while the various varieties of Nahuatl form a part of the larger Uto-Aztecan language family.

The Mayan and Uto-Aztecan languages have not been shown to the satisfaction of the linguistic community to share a common ancestor, so we have no evidence that they are related to one another.

That being said, both of these language groupings fall into the Mesoamerican language area, and share a number of common features likely due to long-term contact (Campbell et al. 1986). For instance, the languages in Mesoamerica have a specific possession construction, where for the equivalent of English the man's dog, you would find something like his-dog man. Additonally, while many surrounding languages have a word order of Subject-Object-Verb (compare English SVO She eats cake with Japanese SOV Kanojo-ga keiki-o taberu, literally 'She cake eats', and with Irish VSO Itheann sí císte, literally 'Eat-I cake'), there are no verb-final languages in the Mesoamerican language area.

So in the sense of having things in common for reasons other than sharing a common ancestor, they do certainly have things in common.