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Nawat (academically Pipil, also known as Nahuat) is a Nahuan languages language native to Central America. It is the southernmost extant member of the Uto-Aztecan family.
Before Spanish colonization it was spoken in several parts of present-day Central America, most notably El Salvador and Nicaragua, but now is mostly confined to western El Salvador. Nahuat was still spoken in several towns in Pacific Guatemala until at least the late 1700s.Fowler, William Roy, The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations: The Pipil-Nicarao of Central America (1981) pp. 53 It has been on the verge of extinction in El Salvador, and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America. In 2012, a large number of new Nawat speakers started to appear. As of today, the language is currently going through a revitalization.In El Salvador, Nawat (Nahuat) was the language of several groups: Nonualcos, Cuscatlecos, Izalcos and is known to be the Nahua variety of migrating Toltec. The name Pipil for this language is mostly used by the international scholarly community to differentiate it more clearly from Nahuatl. In Nicaragua it was spoken by the Nicarao people who split from the Pipil around 1200 CE when they migrated south. Nawat became the lingua franca there during the 16th century.Fowler, William Roy, The Pipil-Nicarao of Central America, Thesis or Dissertation. Ph.D., Archaeology, University of Calgary, 1981 also published as a book by Univ of Oklahoma Press (June 1989), A hybrid form of Nahuat-Spanish was spoken by many Nicaraguans up until the 19th century. The Nawat language was also spoken in Chiapas by Toltec settlers who inhabited the region for hundreds of years before migrating further into Central America.
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Gordon (2009) lists Dolores as a Pipil-speaking area.Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.) Ethnologue: Languages of the world (16th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
Nahuat was also formerly spoken in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, though it is now extinct in all of these countries.
Kaufman (1970:66) lists Escuintla and Comapa as former Pipil-speaking areas of Guatemala, and San Agustín Acasaguastlán as a former "Mejicano"-speaking town.Terrence Kaufman. 1970. Proyecto de alfabetos y ortografías para escribir las lenguas mayances. Antigua: Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra. The genetic position of San Agustín Acasaguastlán Mejicano is still uncertain ( see Alagüilac language).
In Honduras, ethnic Nahua populations are present in small numbers in the Olancho Department, in the municipalities of Catacamas, Gualaco, Guata, Jano and Esquipulas del Norte. The conquest-era Papayeca population, who lived in the environs of the present-day city of Trujillo, have also been speculated to have been Nahuat speakers.
In Nicaragua, the Nicaraos are present in the Rivas Department and Jinotega departments, and in Sébaco.
Bagaces, Costa Rica was home to a Nahua population during the 16th century.
An extinct variation of Nahuatl spoken on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Chiapas is speculated to have been closely related to Nahuat.
Nawat specialists (Lyle Campbell, Fidias Jiménez, Geoffroy Rivas, King, Lemus, and Schultze, inter alia) generally treat Pipil/Nawat as a separate language, at least in practice. Yolanda Lastra (1986) and Una Canger (1988) classify Pipil among "Eastern Periphery" dialects of Nahuatl.: 1. Pipil people, 2. Lenca people, 3. Cacaopera people, 4. Xinca people, 5. Maya peoples Ch'orti' people, 6. Maya peoples Poqomam people, 7. Mangue language.]] (Campbell 1985)
Uto-Aztecan is uncontroversially divided into eight branches, including Nahuan. Research continues into verifying higher level groupings. However, the grouping adopted by Campbell of the four southernmost branches is not yet universally accepted.
The varieties of Nawat in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica are now extinct language. It was still spoken in Guatemala by almost nine thousand people in 1772.Solano y Perez Lila, Francisco de. Areas lingüísticas y población de habla indígena de Guatemala en 1772. Spain, Departamento de Historia de América de la Universidad de Madrid, 1969.
In El Salvador, Nawat is endangered: it is spoken mostly by a few elderly speakers in the Salvadoran departments of Sonsonate, San Salvador, and Ahuachapán. The towns of Cuisnahuat and Santo Domingo de Guzmán have the highest concentration of speakers. Campbell's 1985 estimate (based on fieldwork conducted 1970–1976) was 200 speakers. Gordon (2005) reports only 20 speakers were left in 1987. Official Mexican reports have recorded as many as 2000 speakers.
The exact number of speakers has been difficult to determine because persecution of Nawat speakers throughout the 20th century (massacres after suppression of the 1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising, laws that made speaking Nawat illegal) made them conceal their use of the language. (About 30,000 people were killed during the uprising over the course of a few weeks, and those who spoke Nawat outside their homes against the new rules "provoked shame and fear." A young Nawat language activist, Carlos Cortez, explained in 2010 that this fear is worse for older speakers.)
A few small-scale projects to revitalize Nawat in El Salvador have been attempted since 1990. The Asociación Coordinadora de Comunidades Indígenas de El Salvador ( ACCIES ) and Universidad Don Bosco of San Salvador have both produced some teaching materials. Monica Ward has developed an on-line language course. The Nawat Language Recovery Initiative is a grassroots association currently engaged in several activities including an ongoing language documentation project, and has also produced a range of printed materials. Thus, as the number of native speakers continues to dwindle, there is growing interest in some quarters in keeping the language alive, but as of 2002, the national government had not joined these efforts (cf. Various, 2002).
As of 2010, the town of Santo Domingo de Guzmán had a language nest, “Xuchikisa nawat” ("the house where Nawat blooms"), where children three to five years of age learned Nawat, run in cooperation with Don Bosco University.
In 2010, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes awarded the National Culture Prize (Premio Nacional de Cultura 2010) to linguist Dr. Jorge Ernesto Lemus of Don Bosco University for his work with Nawat.
According to a 2009 report in El Diario de Hoy, Nawat had started to make a comeback as a result of the preservation and revitalization efforts of various non-profit organizations in conjunction with several universities, combined with a post-civil war resurgence of Pipil identity in El Salvador. In the 1980s, Nawat had about 200 speakers. By 2009, 3,000 people were participating in Nawat language learning programs, the vast majority being young people, giving rise to hopes that the language might be pulled back from the brink of extinction.
However, Nawat corresponds to not only the two Classical Nahuatl sounds and but also a word final saltillo or glottal stop in nominal plural suffixes (e.g. Nawat -met : Classical -meh) and verbal plural endings (Nawat -t present plural, -ket past plural, etc.). This fact has been claimed by Campbell to be diagnostic for the position of Nawat in a genetic classification, on the assumption that this is more archaic than the Classical Nahuatl reflex, where the direction change has been > saltillo.
One other characteristic phonological feature is the merger in Nawat of original geminate with single .
| + Comparison: Noun phrase ! align="center" | ! align="center"Nahuatl ! align="center" | Nawat ! align="center" | Nawat example |
Many nouns are invariable for construct state, since -ti (cf. Classical -tli, the absolute suffix after consonants) is rarely added to polysyllabic noun stems, while the Classical postconsonantal construct suffix, -wi, is altogether unknown in Nawat: thus sin-ti 'maize' : nu-sin 'my maize', uj-ti 'way' : nu-uj 'my way', mistun 'cat' : nu-mistun 'my cat'.
An important number of nouns lack absolute forms and occur only inalienably possessed, e.g. nu-mey 'my hand' (but not * mey or * mey-ti), nu-nan 'my mother' (but not * nan or * nan-ti), thus further reducing the number of absolute-construct oppositions and the incidence of absolute -ti in comparison to Classical Nahuatl.
have been eliminated from the Pipil grammatical system, and some monosyllabic originating from relational noun have become grammaticalized.
| + Comparison: Verb ! align="center" | ! align="center"Nahuatl ! align="center" | Nawat ! align="center" | Nawat example |
To form the past tense, most Nawat verbs add -k (after vowels) or -ki (after consonants, following loss of the final vowel of the present stem), e.g. ki-neki 'he wants it' : ki-neki-k 'he wanted it', ki-mati 'he knows it' : ki-mat-ki 'he knew it'. The mechanism of simply removing the present stem vowel to form past stems, so common in Classical Nahuatl, is limited in Nawat to polysyllabic verb stems such as ki-talia 'he puts it' → ki-tali(j) 'he put it', mu-talua 'he runs' → mu-talu(j) 'he ran', and a handful of other verbs, e.g. ki-tajtani 'he asks him' → ki-tajtan 'he asked him'.
Nawat has a perfect in -tuk (synchronically unanalyzable), plural -tiwit. Another tense suffix, -tuya, functions both as a pluperfect ( k-itz-tuya ne takat 'he had seen the man') and as an imperfect of stative verbs ( inte weli-tuya 'he couldn't'), in the latter case having supplanted the -ya imperfect found in Mexican dialects.
Nawat has two Conditional mood tenses, one in -skia expressing possible conditions and possible results, and one in -tuskia for impossible ones, although the distinction is sometimes blurred in practice. A future tense in -s (plural -sket) is attested but rarely used, a periphrastic future being preferred, e.g. yawi witz (or yu-witz) 'he will come'.
In serial verb constructions, the present tense (really the markedness tense) is generally found except in the first verb, regardless of the tense of the latter, e.g. kineki / kinekik / kinekiskia kikwa 'he wants / wanted / would like to eat it'.
There are also some differences regarding how are attached to verb-initial stems; principally, that in Nawat the prefixes ni-, ti-, shi- and ki- when word-initial retain their i in most cases, e.g. ni-ajsi 'I arrive', ki-elkawa 'he forgets it'.
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