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An Indigenous Language That Refuses to Die

By Edgardo Ayala

SAN SALVADOR - "Yek shiajfikan" reads a sign hanging above the gate of the "Dr. Mario Calvo Marroquín" elementary school in the Salvadoran town of Izalco, welcoming pupils in Nawat, the language that was spoken by the area’s native communities.

A small group of no more than twelve boys and girls are gathered in a small classroom in the southwest province of Sonsonate, singing the national anthem, in a scene that could be set in any other school in the country - except here they’re not singing it in Spanish, but in Nawat, the language of their ancestors.

In 2002, teachers at this school took it upon themselves to begin teaching their pupils the language that was spoken by the Nahua-Pipil communities when the Spanish colonialists arrived in the sixteenth century – a language that is now on the brink of extinction.

The language was brought to Central America in pre-Hispanic times by groups that migrated from the central region of present-day Mexico in the tenth century, anthropologist Ramón Rivas explained to IPS.

Nawat, or Pipil as it is also called, is a Uto-Aztecan language descended from Nahuatl, which is still widely spoken in many parts of Mexico. The Salvadoran variety, however, is endangered, and has already vanished elsewhere in Central America.

Today, there are only around 200 Nawat speakers left in this country of 5.7 million, according to the 2009 edition of the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The Atlas, launched early this year just prior to International Mother Language Day (Feb. 21), contains updated data on about 2,500 endangered languages around the world, ranking them in five categories, which go from 'vulnerable' to 'extinct', according to their degree of endangerment.

Nawat is classified as 'critically endangered' - the category prior to extinction, which corresponds to languages in which the only speakers are elderly people who moreover speak the language only partially and infrequently.

When these speakers die they will be taking to their graves the language of an ancestral culture, which was spoken not only in what is now El Salvador but also in other parts of Central America.

The initiative implemented by the teachers in Izalco has not received any official support, although the arrival of the new government of left-wing President Mauricio Funes, who took office on Jun. 1, has raised new hopes.

On Sept. 1, 50 children from the school were invited to sing the anthem in Nawat at a ceremony commemorating El Salvador’s 188 years of independence from Spain, in 1821. The celebration was broadcast live on national television.

"I went to see the undersecretary of education and told him, 'I want you to support our project,' and he was interested," the school’s principal, Juliana Ama, told IPS.

According to Ama, it was at that meeting that they came up with the idea of having the schoolchildren sing the national anthem in Nawat.

IPS tried to contact undersecretary Eduardo Badía to learn what the government’s views are on this, but was unable to arrange a meeting.

As in the case of so many other indigenous languages, Nawat started down the path of extinction when the Spanish conquistadors disembarked in 1524, and the process of transculturation took off. But it was accentuated by political and social processes that got underway towards the end of the colonial period.

One of these processes involved the transfer of indigenous lands to large landowners, which among other factors spurred a number of uprisings in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Rivas said.

This social upheaval culminated in a major insurrection in 1833, led by indigenous chief Anastasio Aquino, followed by the Salvadoran state’s systematic persecution of anything connected with the culture of the country’s native people, including their languages, well into the next century.

In 1932, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez ordered the massacre of thousands of Indians in western El Salvador who had taken part in a revolt along with peasants and university and labour activists with links to the Communist Party.

The exact number of victims is unknown, but estimates range from 6,000 to 40,000, according to Rivas, who holds a PhD in anthropology from the Dutch university of Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen.

Fearing for their lives, indigenous survivors tried to conceal their ancestry, stopped speaking their language and abandoned their traditional dress. That same year, Feliciano Ama, chief of the Náhua-Pipil nation, was hung in the central plaza of Izalco to serve as an example for anyone who dared to rebel.

"Things got worse after 1932, when General Hernández imposed a ban on speaking Nawat to further his vision of the nation, in which there was no place for Indians," said Rivas, who has studied the indigenous populations of El Salvador, and Central America in general, in depth.

Another indigenous language of El Salvador, Chortí, has been extinct since the early nineteenth century, he noted.