Word History: Low, swampy land is called tules or tule land in the parlance of northern California. When the Spanish colonized Mexico and Central America in the 1500s, they borrowed many words from Nahuatl, the language spoken by many of the peoples of central Mexico at the time, including the Aztecs, and still spoken by almost a million and a half people in Mexico today. The Nahuatl word tōlin, meaning "reed, sedge," was borrowed into Spanish as tule. Later, when English-speaking settlers began to move into western California in the first part of the 1800s, they borrowed the American Spanish word tule from the speakers of Spanish in the area and used it refer to certain varieties of bulrush native to California. Eventually the meaning of the word was extended to the marshy land where the bulrushes grew.