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.

[11][12][13] The Nawat language was also spoken in Chiapas by Toltec settlers who inhabited the region for hundreds of years before migrating further into Central America.

Kaufman (1970:66) lists Escuintla and Comapa as former Pipil-speaking areas of Guatemala, and San Agustín Acasaguastlán as a former "Mejicano"-speaking town.

In Honduras, ethnic Nahua populations are present in small numbers in the Olancho Department, in the municipalities of Catacamas, Gualaco, Guata, Jano and Esquipulas del Norte.

[22] An extinct variation of Nahuatl spoken on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Chiapas is speculated to have been closely related to Nahuat.

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.

As of 2012, extensive online resources for learning Nawat are available at the website of linguist Alan R. King, including video lessons and a Facebook group.

[27] (About 30,000 people were killed during the uprising over the course of a few weeks, and those who spoke Nawat outside their homes against the new rules "provoked shame and fear."

A young Nawat language activist, Carlos Cortez, explained in 2010 that this fear is worse for older speakers.

Thus, as the number of native speakers continues to dwindle, there is growing interest in some quarters in keeping the language alive, but as of 2002, the national government had not joined these efforts (cf.

[32][33] In 2010, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes awarded the National Culture Prize (Premio Nacional de Cultura 2010) to linguist Dr. Jorge Ernesto Lemus of Don Bosco University for his work with Nawat.

[36] Two salient features of Nawat are found in several Mexican dialects: the change of [t͡ɬ] to [t] and [u] rather than [o] as the predominant allophone of a single basic rounded vowel phoneme.

This fact has been claimed by Campbell to be diagnostic for the position of Nawat in a genetic classification, on the assumption that this /t/ is more archaic than the Classical Nahuatl reflex, where the direction change has been /t/ > /ʔ/ saltillo.

Nawat lacks some grammatical features present in Classical Nahuatl, such as the past prefix o- in verbs.

On the other hand, reduplication to form plural nouns, of more limited distribution in the language of the Aztecs, is greatly generalised in Nawat.