Nahualá

Nahualá
Municipality
Nahualá Location in Guatemala
Coordinates: 14°51′00″N 91°19′00″W / 14.85000°N 91.31667°W / 14.85000; -91.31667
Country	Guatemala
Department	Sololá
Municipality	Nahualá
Government
• Type	Municipal
• Mayor	Manuel Tzoc Carrillo
Area
• Municipality	218 km2 (84 sq mi)
Elevation	2,467 m (8,094 ft)
Population (census 2002)
• Municipality	51,939
• Density	238/km2 (620/sq mi)
• Urban	17,174
• Ethnicities	K'iche', Ladino
• Religions	Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Maya religion
Climate	Cwb
Website	http://www.inforpressca.com/nahuala/

Nahualá (Spanish pronunciation: [nawaˈla]) is a municipality in the Sololá department of Guatemala. The town is sometimes known as Santa Catarina Nahualá, in honor of the town’s patron saint, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but the official name is just "Nahualá".

Nahualá or Nawala' is also the K'iche' (Quiché) language name for the Nahualate River, which is called Niwala' the local Nahualá dialect. The river has its source in the north of the township of Nahualá, and flows through the center of the town's cabecera ("head-town").

Nahuala is the location of radio station Nawal Estereo, the successor to the La Voz de Nahuala, which was founded with the assistance of Roman Catholic clerics in the 1960s. Nowadays, the station broadcasts primarily in the K'iche' language, with some broadcasts also done in Kaqchikel and Spanish.

Local residents translate the name Nahualá roughly as "enchanted waters," "water of the spirits," and "water of the shamans," and they often object to the common Spanish translation of the name as agua de los brujos ("water of the shamans"). Scholars have typically argued that the name Nahualá derives from a compound of the Nahuatl term nagual or nahual (pronounced NA-wal), meaning "magician"(and related to terms for clear or powerful speech) and the K’iche’ root ja', meaning "water". However, the loanword nawal, which entered the Mayan languages about a thousand years ago, came to denote "spirit[s]" or "divine co-essence[s]", as well as "shaman[s]" in K'iche'. Some Maya linguists have argued apocryphally that the "true" name should be Nawalja' or Nawal-ja', disregarding that the word ja’ is regularly apocopated at the ends of words — especially toponyms — not only in K'iche', but also in related Mayan languages. Those who promote the neologisms Nawalja' and Nawal-ja' also ignore that the pronunciation of the neologisms is inconsistent with the pronunciation in sixteenth-century K'iche' — and Kaqchikel-Mayan recorded in several early colonial manuscripts written in Latin orthography by members of the native nobility.

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Wikipedia