awk is the original "little language," combining string processing and regular expressions with a simplified C-like syntax. It is not, strictly speaking, a scripting language, as it traditionally hasn't provided access to the operating system from within its environment. But many of the scripting languages have borrowed liberally from AWK's features.
See also AWK.
PAWK is an awk-like system where actions are treated as Python statements rather than as Awk statements.