Nawat language

Nawat (academically Pipil, also known as Nahuat) is a 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 Spanish colonization, 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. 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. A hybrid form of Nahuat-Spanish was spoken by many Nicaraguans up until the 19th century. Most authors refer to this language by the names Nawat, Nahuat, Pipil, or Nicarao. However, Nawat (along with the synonymous Eastern Nahuatl) has also been used to refer to Nahuatl language varieties in southern Veracruz, Tabasco, and Chiapas, states in the south of Mexico, that like Pipil have reduced the earlier /t͡ɬ/ consonant (a lateral affricate) to a /t/. Those Mexican lects 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) and Canger (1988) classify Pipil among "Eastern Periphery" dialects of Nahuatl. (Campbell 1985) Uto-Aztecan Southern Uto-Aztecan Nahuan (Aztecan, Nahuatlan) Pochutec (extinct) General Aztec Core Nahua Pipil Uto-Aztecan is uncontroversially divided into eight branches, including Nahuan.