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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.
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]
Though Nahuatl still has over a million speakers, it is considered by some linguists to be endangered and on the way to extinction. [1] As with regional languages the world over, Nahuatl finds itself being replaced by a ‘world’ language, Spanish, as other small linguistic communities have shifted to languages like English and Chinese. The ...
Some Nahuatl varieties, notably Classical Nahuatl, can inflect the verb to show the direction of the verbal action going away from or towards the speaker. Some also have specific inflectional categories showing purpose and direction and such complex notions as "to go in order to" or "to come in order to", "go, do and return", "do while going ...
[55] [56] It is also evident that the Nicarao were able to understand Nahuatl, as the Spaniards were able to communicate with Nicaraos they encountered in Nahuatl through their Tlaxcallan translators. Nahuatl was used as a lingua franca at that time because many indigenous groups in Mesoamerica could speak Nahuatl. This culminated an ...
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.
Another, related term is Nāhuatlācatl [naːwaˈt͡ɬaːkat͡ɬ] (singular) or Nāhuatlācah [naːwaˈt͡ɬaːkaʔ] literally "Nahuatl-speaking people". [13] 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.
Map showing the areas of Mexico where Nahuatl dialects are spoken today (red) and where it is known to have been spoken historically (green) [1] 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 /tɬ/ before *a. [ 2 ]