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The Pipil or Kuzcateku are an indigenous people who live in western El Salvador, which they call Cuzcatlan. The Pipil language, or Nawat, belongs to the Nahuatl dialect chain, which stretches from Durango in Mexico to El Salvador, historically also in central Honduras and the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. It is thought that the Pipil, along with the neighbouring Nicarao people, migrated from Central Mexico to their present location around 900 AD, after the Chichimeca-Toltec civil war. As they settled in the area, they founded the city-state of Cuzcatlan, absorbed many other pre-existing polities, and intermarried with the native peoples, mostly Lenca people, Poqomam people, and Xinca people.
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua. 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 Nahuan or Aztecan languages are those languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family that have undergone a sound change, known as Whorf's law, that changed an original *t to before *a. Subsequently, some Nahuan languages have changed this to or back to, but it can still be seen that the language went through a stage. The best known Nahuan language is Nahuatl.
Classical Nahuatl is any of the variants of Nahuatl, spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a lingua franca at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. During the subsequent centuries, it was largely displaced by Spanish and evolved into some of the modern Nahuan languages in use today. Although classified as an extinct language, Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed by Nahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.
In Mexican linguistics, saltillo is the word for a glottal stop consonant. The name was given by the early grammarians of Classical Nahuatl. In a number of other Nahuan languages, the sound cognate to the glottal stop of Classical Nahuatl is, and the term saltillo is applied to either pronunciation. The saltillo is often written with an apostrophe, though it is sometimes written ⟨h⟩ for either pronunciation, or ⟨j⟩ when pronounced. The spelling of the glottal stop with an apostrophe-like character most likely originates from transliterations of the Arabic hamza. It has also been written with a grave accent over the preceding vowel in some Nahuatl works, following Horacio Carochi (1645).
Nawat is a Uto-Toltec or Uto-Nahuan language native to Central America. It is the southernmost extant member of the Uto-Aztecan family. It was spoken in several parts of present-day Central America before the Spanish conquest, but now is mostly confined to western El Salvador. It has been on the verge of extinction in El Salvador and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America, but as of 2012 new second language speakers are starting to appear.
This article provides a grammar sketch of the Nawat or Pipil language, an endangered language spoken by the Pipils of western El Salvador, belonging to the Nahua group within the Uto-Aztecan language family. There also exists a brief typological overview of the language that summarizes the language's most salient features of general typological interest in more technical terms.
Mexicanero is the Nahuan language spoken by the Mexicanero people of southern Durango and northern Nayarit. It has around 1000 speakers in the remote towns of San Pedro Jícora and San Juan Buenaventura in the Mezquital municipality, Durango, where they coexist with speakers of Tepehuán, and some 300 speakers in the Acaponeta municipality of Nayarit. There are significant differences between the varieties of San Pedro Jícora on the one hand and San Agustín Buenaventura and Nayarit on the other. The language is vibrant and spoken by adults and children.
Pochutec is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language of the Nahuan branch which was spoken in and around the town of Pochutla on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. In 1917 it was documented in a monograph by Franz Boas, who considered the language nearly extinct. In the 1970s another investigator found two speakers around Pochutla who still remembered a few of the words recorded by Boas.
Teotl is a Nahuatl term that is often translated as "god". It may have held more abstract aspects of the numinous or divine, akin to the Polynesian concept of Mana. It is a central idea of Aztec religion. In Pipil mythology Teut is known as the creator and father of life. The nature of Teotl has been an ongoing discussion among scholars.
El Güegüense is a satirical drama and was the first literary work of post-Columbian Nicaragua. It is regarded as one of Latin America's most distinctive colonial-era expressions and as Nicaragua's signature folkloric masterpiece combining music, dance and theater. There was also a monument built in the center of a rotonda (roundabout) in Managua, in its honor. El Güegüense is performed during the feast of San Sebastián in Diriamba from January 17 to the 27th
The Nahua are an indigenous people of Mexico and Central America.
Proto-Nahuan is the hypothetical daughter language of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan language. It is the common ancestor from which the modern Nahuan languages have developed.
Nahuatl, known historically as Aztec, is a language or group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about 1.7 million Nahua peoples, most of whom live in central Mexico.
The Central Puebla Nahuatl language is a Nahuan language spoken by 16,000 people in Mexico with 1,430 monolinguals. It is also known as Central Puebla Aztec, Náhuatl del Suroeste de Puebla, and Southwestern Puebla Nahuatl. The language is spoken in the area south of the city of Puebla in the towns of Teopantlán, Tepatlaxco de Hidalgo, La Magdalena Yancuitlalpan, Atoyatempan, Huatlathauca, and Huehuetlán near Molcaxac. It is written in the Latin script and is taught in most grammar schools of the area.
The Tlaxcala-Puebla Nahuatl language, also known as Central Nahuatl, is a Nahuan language spoken by 40,000 people in central Mexico.
The Guerrero Nahuatl language is a Nahuan language spoken by 150,000 people in Mexico.
Eastern Peripheral Nahuatl is a group of Nahuatl languages, including the Pipil language of El Salvador and the Nahuatl dialects of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, southern Veracruz, and Tabasco :
Whorf's law is a sound law in Uto-Aztecan linguistics proposed by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. It explains the origin in the Nahuan languages of the phoneme which is not found in any of the other languages of the Uto-Aztecan family. The existence of in Nahuatl had puzzled previous linguists and caused Edward Sapir to reconstruct a phoneme for Proto-Uto-Aztecan based only on evidence from Aztecan. In a 1937 paper published in the journal American Anthropologist, Whorf argued that phoneme was a result of some of the Nahuan or Aztecan languages having undergone a sound change changing the original */t/ to in the position before */a/. The sound law has come to be known as "Whorf's law" and is still considered valid, although a more detailed understanding of the precise conditions under which it took place has been developed.
Uto-Aztecan languages are divided into two groups, Northern and Southern Uto-Aztecan languages. They are spoken in the southwestern United States, north and central Mexico, and in Central America.
References
- 1 2 Tabasco Nahuatl at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Tabasco Nahuatl". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- ↑ Tabasco Nawat: A *not* extinct Nahuatl variety