Chavalo
A kid, a lad, a young person — the default Nicaraguan word for anyone younger than the speaker.
Related lesson: Nicaraguan Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Ese chavalo es el hijo de la vecina.
That kid is the neighbour's son.
Los chavalos andan jugando en la calle.
The kids are out playing in the street.
Desde chavalo trabajo con mi papá.
I've worked with my dad since I was a boy.
What It Actually Means
Chavalo (feminine chavala) is a young person: a child, a teenager, a lad in his twenties seen from the far side of forty. It is the word Nicaraguan parents use about their children, teachers about their pupils and older men about anyone they consider green. Nicaragua and Honduras run on it the way Peru runs on chibolo and Mexico on chavo.
Where It Comes From
From Spain’s chaval, which came into Spanish from Caló, the language of the Spanish Roma, where chavó is “boy” — a word ultimately shared with Romani chavo and, by a longer route, with English “chav”. Central America added its own ending: chaval became chavalo, and the extra syllable is the tell. Say chaval in Managua and you have said something Spanish; say chavalo in Madrid and you have said something Nicaraguan.
How Natives Use It
Freely and at every register short of the formal. As a description (un chavalo de quince años), as a stage of life (desde chavalo, cuando era chavala), and occasionally as a mild rebuke to an adult behaving like a teenager (no seás chavalo). It is not a vocative in the way chele is — you rarely call someone chavalo to their face — and it carries no disrespect on its own.
Common Pitfall
It is relative, not absolute. A chavalo is young compared with whoever is speaking, so a sixty-year-old can call a man of thirty-five a chavalo without irony, and being called one in your thirties is a comment on the speaker’s age rather than yours. Applied to someone your own age it becomes a small dig — the implication is inexperience — which is precisely why no seás chavalo works as a telling-off.