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| Nawat | |
|---|---|
| Pipil | |
| Nāwat, Nāwataketsalis (Náhuat) | |
| Native to | El Salvador,Nicaragua,Chiapas,Honduras,Guatemala,Costa Rica[1][2][3][4][5] |
| Region | Sonsonate,Ahuachapán,La Libertad,San Salvador,Escuintla,Rivas,Chinandega,Jinotega,Nueva Segovia,Masaya,Matagalpa,Guanacaste,Olancho |
| Ethnicity | 11,100Pipils (2005 census),[6] 20,000+Nicaraos (2022)[7] |
Native speakers | 500 (2015)[6] L2: 3,000 learners (2012)[8] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ppl |
| Glottolog | pipi1250 |
| ELP | Pipil |
 Pipil is classified as Critically Endangered by theUNESCOAtlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
Nawat (academicallyPipil, also known asNahuat) is aNahuan language native toCentral America. It is the southernmost extant member of theUto-Aztecan family.[9] BeforeSpanish colonization it was spoken in several parts of present-day Central America, most notablyEl Salvador andNicaragua, but now is mostly confined to western El Salvador.[3] 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 migratingToltec. The namePipil for this language is mostly used by the international scholarly community to differentiate it more clearly fromNahuatl. InNicaragua it was spoken by theNicarao people who split from the Pipil around 1200 CE when they migrated south. Nawat became thelingua franca there during the 16th century.[10] A hybrid form of Nahuat-Spanish was spoken by many Nicaraguans up until the 19th century.[11][12][13] The Nawat language was also spoken inChiapas by Toltec settlers who inhabited the region for hundreds of years before migrating further into Central America.[14][3][15][16][17]
Localities where Nawat/Pipil was reported byCampbell as spoken in the 1970s include the following:
Gordon (2009) listsDolores as a Pipil-speaking area.[18]
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) listsEscuintla andComapa as former Pipil-speaking areas ofGuatemala, andSan Agustín Acasaguastlán as a former "Mejicano"-speaking town.[19] The genetic position of San Agustín Acasaguastlán Mejicano is still uncertain (seeAlagüilac language).
In Honduras, ethnic Nahua populations are present in small numbers in theOlancho Department, in the municipalities ofCatacamas,Gualaco,Guata,Jano andEsquipulas del Norte.[20] The conquest-era Papayeca population, who lived in the environs of the present-day city ofTrujillo, have also been speculated to have been Nahuat speakers.
In Nicaragua, the Nicaraos are present in theRivas andJinotega departments, and inSébaco.[21]
Bagaces, Costa Rica was home to a Nahua population during the 16th century.[22]
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.
Most authors refer to this language by the namesNawat,Nahuat,Pipil, orNicarao. However,Nawat (along with the synonymousEastern Nahuatl) has also been used to refer to Nahuatllanguage varieties in southernVeracruz,Tabasco, andChiapas, states in the south of Mexico, that like Pipil have reduced the earlier /t͡ɬ/ consonant (a lateralaffricate) to a /t/.[23] Those Mexicanlects share more similarities with Nawat than do the other Nahuatl varieties.
Nawat specialists (Campbell, Fidias Jiménez,Geoffroy Rivas,King,Lemus, and Schultze,inter alia) generally treat Pipil/Nawat as a separate language, at least in practice.Lastra de Suárez (1986) andCanger (1988) classify Pipil among "Eastern Periphery" dialects of Nahuatl.
(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.
As of 2012, extensiveonline resources for learning Nawat are available at the website of linguist Alan R. King, including video lessons and a Facebook group.[24] A video documentation project is also underway, in collaboration with theLiving Tongues Institute, focusing on "Pipil culture, such as natural medicines, traditions, traditional games, agricultural practices, and childhood songs," which is intended for language learners.[25]
The varieties of Nawat inGuatemala,Honduras,Nicaragua, andCosta Rica are nowextinct. It was still spoken in Guatemala by almost nine thousand people in 1772.[26]
In El Salvador, Nawat is endangered: it is spoken mostly by a few elderly speakers in the Salvadoran departments ofSonsonate,San Salvador, andAhuachapán. The towns ofCuisnahuat andSanto 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.[citation needed]
The exact number of speakers has been difficult to determine because persecution of Nawat speakers throughout the 20th century (massacres after suppression of the1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising, laws that made speaking Nawat illegal) made them conceal their use of the language.[27] (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.[28])
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 (ACCIESArchived 2 March 2007 at theWayback Machine) andUniversidad Don Bosco of San Salvador have both produced some teaching materials. Monica Ward has developed an on-line language course.[29] The Nawat Language Recovery Initiative[30] is a grassroots association currently engaged in several activities including an ongoinglanguage 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).[31]
As of 2010, the town ofSanto Domingo de Guzmán had alanguage nest, “Xuchikisa nawat” ("the house where Nawat blooms"), where children three to five years of age learned Nawat, run in cooperation withDon Bosco University.[32][33]
In 2010, Salvadoran PresidentMauricio 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.[34][35]
According to a 2009 report inEl 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.[36]
Two salient features of Nawat are found in several Mexican dialects: the change of[t͡ɬ] to[t] and[u] rather than[o] as the predominantallophone of a single basic rounded vowel phoneme.[citation needed] These features are thus characteristic but not diagnostic.
However, Nawat/t/ corresponds to not only the two Classical Nahuatl sounds/t/ and/t͡ɬ/ but also a word finalsaltillo orglottal stop/ʔ/ 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/t/ is more archaic than the Classical Nahuatl reflex, where the direction change has been/t/ >/ʔ/saltillo.
One other characteristic phonological feature is the merger in Nawat of original geminate/ll/ with single/l/.
Nawat lacks some grammatical features present in Classical Nahuatl, such as the past prefixo- in verbs. It distributes others differently: for example, 'subtractive' past formation, which is very common in the classical language, exists in Nawat but is much rarer. On the other hand,reduplication to form plural nouns, of more limited distribution in the language of the Aztecs, is greatly generalised in Nawat. Still other grammatical features that were productive in Classical Nahuatl have left only fossilised traces in Nawat: for example, synchronically Nawat has nopostpositions, although a few lexical forms derive etymologically from older postpositional forms, e.g.apan 'river' < *'in/on the water',kujtan 'uncultivated land, forest' < *'under the trees'; these are synchronically unanalyzable in modern Nawat.
| Nahuatl | Nawat | Nawat example | |
|---|---|---|---|
| plural marking | limited in Classical | generalized | taj-tamal 'tortillas' sej-selek 'tender, fresh (pl.)' |
| plural formation | mostly suffixes | mostly redup. | |
| absolute-tli (Nawat-ti) | generally kept | often absent | mistun 'cat (abs.)' |
| construct /C_ | -wi or zero | always zero | nu-uj 'my path' |
| inalienability | nouns generally have absolutes | many inalienables | *mey-ti, *nan-ti... |
| possessive prefixes | loseo before vowel | retain vowel (u) | nu-ikaw 'my brother' |
| articles | no generalized articles in Classical | definitene, indefinitese | ne/se takat 'the/a man' |
| post/prepositions | postpositions | no post-, only prepositions | tik ne apan 'in the river' |
Nawat has developed two widely usedarticles,definitene andindefinitese. Thedemonstrative pronouns/determinersini 'this, these' anduni 'that, those' are also distinctively Nawat in form. The obligatory marking ofnumber extends in Nawat to almost allpluralnoun phrases (regardless ofanimacy), which will contain at least one plural form, most commonly marked byreduplication.
Many nouns are invariable forstate, 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: thussin-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 onlyinalienably 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.
Postpositions have been eliminated from the Pipil grammatical system, and some monosyllabicprepositions originating fromrelationals have becomegrammaticalized.
| Nahuatl | Nawat | Nawat example | |
|---|---|---|---|
| inflection | more complex | less complex; analytic substitutes | kuchi nemi katka 'used to stay and sleep' |
| past prefixo- | found in Classical + some dialects | no | ki-neki-k 'he wanted it' ni-kuch-ki 'I slept' |
| subtractive past formation | common in Classical + some dialects | limited | |
| past in-ki | no | yes | |
| perfect in-tuk | no | yes | ni-kuch-tuk 'I have slept' |
| imperfect | -ya | -tuya (stative) | ni-weli-tuya 'I could' |
| -skia,-tuskia conditionals | no | yes | ni-takwika-(tu)-skia 'I would sing/I would have sung' |
| initial prefixes /_V | losei | mostly retaini | niajsi 'I arrive', kielkawa 'he forgets it' |
To form thepast 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 aski-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 aperfect in-tuk (synchronically unanalyzable), plural-tiwit. Another tense suffix,-tuya, functions both as apluperfect (k-itz-tuya ne takat 'he had seen the man') and as animperfect ofstative verbs (inte weli-tuya 'he couldn't'), in the latter case having supplanted the-ya imperfect found in Mexican dialects.
Nawat has twoconditional 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. Afuture tense in-s (plural-sket) is attested but rarely used, aperiphrastic future being preferred, e.g.yawi witz (oryu-witz) 'he will come'.
Inserial constructions, thepresent tense (really theunmarked 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 howprefixes are attached to verb-initial stems; principally, that in Nawat the prefixesni-,ti-,shi- andki- when word-initial retain theiri in most cases, e.g.ni-ajsi 'I arrive',ki-elkawa 'he forgets it'.
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