NATIVE AMERICAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF EL SALVADOR IN CENTRAL AMERICA ISTHMUS

Cacaopera is an extinct language belonging to the

Misumalpan The Misumalpan languages (also Misumalpa or Misuluan) are a small family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples on the east coast of Nicaragua and nearby areas. The name "Misumalpan" was devised by John Alden Mason and is composed of syllables ...

family, formerly spoken in the department of Morazán in

El Salvador El Salvador (; , meaning " The Saviour"), officially the Republic of El Salvador ( es, República de El Salvador), is a country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south b ...

by the

Cacaopera people The Cacaopera people also known as the Matagalpa or Ulúa., are an indigenous people in what is now El Salvador and Nicaragua. History The Matagalpa are one of the most important cultures in the historical development of the Nicaraguan territory ...

. It was closely related to

Matagalpa Matagalpa () is a city in Nicaragua which is the capital of the department of Matagalpa. The city has a population of 111,258 (2021 estimate),Sumo is a form of competitive full-contact wrestling where a ''rikishi'' (wrestler) attempts to force his opponent out of a circular ring (''dohyō'') or into touching the ground with any body part other than the soles of his feet (usually by thr ...

, but was geographically separated from other Misumalpan languages. The last

semi-speaker Within the linguistic study of endangered languages, sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from ...

s of Cacaopera lived in the 1970s. All

native speakers A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tongu ...

had died before this time.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

References

External links

Recording of a semi-speaker of Cacaopera
from 1973, from the MesoAmerican Language

of

Lyle Campbell Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in ...

at the

Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a digital repository housed in LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin. AILLA is a digital language archive dedicated to the digi ...

. Misumalpan languages Languages of El Salvador Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 20th century {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub