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The Nahuas are a Uto-Nahuan ethnicity and one of the indigenous people of Mexico, with Nahua minorities also in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico, as well as the largest group of Native Americans in North America by number of native speakers, and the third in the Americas after Guaraní and Quechua.
Costa Rican culture has been heavily influenced by Spanish culture ever since the Spanish colonization of the Americas including the territory which today forms Costa Rica. Parts of the country have other strong cultural influences, including the Caribbean province of Limón and the Cordillera de Talamanca which are influenced by Jamaican immigrants and indigenous native people, respectively.
Guanacaste is a province of Costa Rica located in the northwestern region of the country, along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. It is bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Alajuela Province to the east, and Puntarenas Province to the southeast. It is the most sparsely populated of all the provinces of Costa Rica. The province covers an area of 10,141 square kilometres (3,915 sq mi) and as of 2010, had a population of 354,154, with annual revenue of $2 billion.
Liberia is a district and the largest city in the Guanacaste Province of Costa Rica, located 215 kilometres (134 mi) northwest of the national capital, San José. Part of the Liberia canton, it is a major center for the country's tourism industry.
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and seven major language families. Mesoamerica is also an area of high linguistic diffusion in that long-term interaction among speakers of different languages through several millennia has resulted in the convergence of certain linguistic traits across disparate language families. The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Oto-Manguean is widely viewed as a proven language family.
The Misumalpan languages are a small family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples on the east coast of Nicaragua and nearby areas. The name "Misumalpan" was devised by John Alden Mason and is composed of syllables from the names of the family's three members Miskito, Sumo languages and Matagalpan. It was first recognized by Walter Lehmann in 1920. While all the languages of the Matagalpan branch are now extinct, the Miskito and Sumu languages are alive and well: Miskito has almost 200,000 speakers and serves as a second language for speakers of other indigenous languages in the Mosquito Coast. According to Hale, most speakers of Sumu also speak Miskito.
Mangue, Mangué or Mangüé may refer to:
The Lencan languages are a small linguistic family from Central America, whose speakers before the Spanish conquest spread throughout El Salvador and Honduras. But by the beginning of the 20th century, only two languages of the family survived, Salvadoran Lenca or Potón and Honduran Lenca, which were described and studied academically; Of them, only Salvadoran Lenca still has current speakers, despite the fact that indigenous people belonging to the Lenca ethnic group exceed between 37,000 and 100,000 people.
The Maléku Jaíka language, also called Malecu, Maleku, Guatuso, Watuso-Wétar, and Guetar, is an Indigenous American language of the Chibchan family spoken in Costa Rica.
Bribri, also known as Bri-bri, Bribriwak, and Bribri-wak, is a Chibchan language, from a language family indigenous to the Isthmo-Colombian Area, which extends from eastern Honduras to northern Colombia and includes populations of those countries as well as Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. As of 2002, there were about 11,000 speakers left. An estimate by the National Census of Costa Rica in 2011 found that Bribri is currently spoken by 54.7% of the 12,785 Bribri people, about 7,000 individuals. It is a tonal language whose word order is subject–object–verb.
Costa Rica's official and predominant language is Spanish. The variety spoken there, Costa Rican Spanish, is a form of Central American Spanish.
The official language of Nicaragua is Spanish; however, Nicaraguans on the Caribbean coast speak indigenous languages and also English. The communities located on the Caribbean coast also have access to education in their native languages. Additionally, Nicaragua has four extinct indigenous languages.
This is an index of Central America-related articles. This index defines Central America as the seven nations of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.
The extinct Manguean languages were a branch of the Oto-Manguean family. They were Chorotega of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and Chiapanec of Mexico. According to Kaufman (1974), linguistic evidence points to a separation between these two languages around AD 600-700. Based on archaeological and linguistic evidence, it is often theorized that these languages originated in what is now the Mexican state of Puebla before migrating southeast to Chiapas in the late Classic period.
Chorotega may refer to:
Nicarao, or Macuilmiquiztli was the name of a ruler of the Nicarao, a Nahua group that inhabited the land they called Nicānāhuac, located in present-day western Nicaragua and northwestern Costa Rica. Based on research done by historians in 2002, it was discovered that his real name was Macuilmiquiztli, meaning "Five Deaths" in the Nahuatl language. Macuilmiquiztli governed the Nicarao from his capital Kwawkapolkan, which is Nahuat for place of the acorns or capulines of the forest. It was located in what is today the department of Rivas in southwestern Nicaragua.
The Spanish conquest of Nicaragua was the campaign undertaken by the Spanish conquistadores and their Tlaxcaltec allies against the natives of the territory now incorporated into the modern Central American republic of Nicaragua during the colonisation of the Americas. Before European contact in the early 16th century, Nicaragua was inhabited by a number of indigenous peoples. The west was inhabited by Mesoamerican groups such as the Nicarao, the Chorotega, and the Subtiaba. The Nicarao are a Nahua people closely related to the Mexica of Mexico. The Chorotega and the Subtiaba are closely related to the Zapotecs and Mixtecs of Oaxaca, Mexico due to their shared Otomanguean ethnicity. Other groups included the Matagalpa and the Tacacho, both of which mainly inhabited central Nicaragua.
The Nicarao are an Indigenous Nahua people who live in western Nicaragua and northwestern Costa Rica. They are the southernmost Nahua group located at the southern frontier of Mesoamerica. They spoke the Nahuat language before it went extinct in both countries after Spanish conquest.
The Kingdom of Nicoya, also called Cacicazgo or Lordship of Nicoya, was an indigenous nation that comprised much of the territory of the current Guanacaste Province, in the North Pacific of Costa Rica. Its political, economic and religious center was the city of Nicoya, located on the peninsula of the same name, which depends on several provinces located on both banks of the Gulf of Nicoya, as well as numerous tributary villages. In the 16th century, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Nicoya was the most important chiefdom of the North Pacific of present-day Costa Rica.
References
- Kaufman, Terrence, (2001) Nawa linguistic prehistory, published at website of the Mesoamerican Language Documentation Project Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine
- Fabre, Alain, (2005) Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: OTOMANGUE.
- McCallister, Rick. Mangue Chorotega Archived 2012-04-27 at the Wayback Machine , published on line in 2012 (80+ pages in PDF) (based on Quirós Rodríguez’s compilation with added toponyms, cultural terms, etc.)
- Constenla Umaña, Adolfo (Author). (1992). "The Languages of the Greater Nicoya". Costa Rican Languages Collection of Adolfo Constenla Umaña . The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America: www.ailla.utexas.org. Media: text. Access: public. Resource: MUL010R001. Archived 2017-01-10 at the Wayback Machine