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The Nahuatl language in the United States is spoken primarily by Mexican immigrants from indigenous communities and Chicanos who study and speak Nahuatl as L2. Despite the fact that there is no official census of the language in the North American country, it is estimated that there are around 140,800 Nahuatl speakers.
Nahuatl is spoken by over 1 million people, with approximately 10% of speakers being monolingual. As a whole, Nahuatl is not considered to be an endangered language; however, during the late 20th century several Nahuatl dialects became extinct. [73] The 1990s saw radical changes in Mexican policy concerning indigenous and linguistic rights.
The extinct Classical Nahuatl, the enormously influential language spoken by the people of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, is one of the Central dialects. Lastra in her dialect atlas proposed three Peripheral groupings: eastern, western, and Huasteca. [12] She included Pipil in Nahuatl, assigning it to the Eastern Periphery grouping.
Despite the forced Hispanicization, [114] Nahuatl is still spoken by more than two million people, of which around 10% are monolingual. The survival of Nahuatl as a whole is not in imminent danger, but the survival of certain dialects is; and some have already become extinct during the last decades of the 20th century.
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. [7] 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. [3]
Another, related term is Nāhuatlācatl [naːwaˈt͡ɬaːkat͡ɬ] (singular) or Nāhuatlācah [naːwaˈt͡ɬaːkaʔ] literally "Nahuatl-speaking people". [12] The Nahuas are also sometimes referred to as Aztecs. Using this term for the Nahuas has generally fallen out of favor in scholarship, though it is still used for the Aztec Empire.
Still in other cases, the phoneme in question disappeared completely, for example in tiza (<tízatl), or “chalk.” An important present-day exception is the nahuatlism náhuatl, or “Nahuatl,” which preserves the “tl” sound in Spanish. However, this has not always been the case, since the form “nahuate” was also used at one point.
Thus the name of Cervantes’ famous fictional character was pronounced /dɔn kiʃɔtɛ/ and written as Don Quixote in the 16th century, with the letter x representing /ʃ/. [ 16 ] The letters b , d , f , g , j , r , s , and v are not needed for the writing of native Nahuatl words, but they can be used in the spelling of Spanish loanwords.