New Mexican Spanish
New Mexican Spanish, or New Mexican and Southern Colorado Spanish refers to certain traditional varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States in New Mexico and southern Colorado, which are different from the Spanish spoken by recent immigrants. It includes a traditional indigenous dialect spoken generally by Oasisamerican peoples and Hispano—descendants, who live mostly in New Mexico, southern Colorado, in Pueblos, Jicarilla, Mescalero, the Navajo Nation, and in other parts of the former regions of Nuevo Mexico and the New Mexico Territory.
Due to New Mexico's unique political history and over 400 years of relative geographic isolation, New Mexican Spanish is unique within Hispanic America, with the closest similarities found only in certain rural areas of northern Mexico and Texas; it has been described as unlike any form of Spanish in the world. This dialect is sometimes called Traditional New Mexican Spanish, or the Spanish Dialect of the Upper Rio Grande Region, to distinguish it from the relatively more recent Mexican variety spoken in the south of the state and among more recent Spanish-speaking immigrants.
Among the distinctive features of New Mexican Spanish are the preservation of archaic forms and vocabulary from colonial-era Spanish ; the borrowing of words from Puebloan languages, in addition to the Nahuatl loanwords brought by some colonists ; independent lexical and morphological innovations; and a large proportion of English loanwords, particularly for technology.
Despite surviving centuries of political and social change, including campaigns of suppression in the early 20th century, Traditional New Mexican Spanish is, as of the early 2020s, threatened with extinction over the next few decades; causes include rural flight from the isolated communities that preserved it, the growing influence of Mexican Spanish, and intermarriage and interaction between Hispanos and Mexican immigrants. The traditional dialect has increasingly mixed with contemporary varieties, resulting in a new dialect sometimes called Renovador. Today, the language can be heard in a popular folk genre called New Mexico music and preserved in the traditions of New Mexican cuisine.
History
The Spanish language first arrived in present-day New Mexico with Juan de Oñate's colonization expedition in 1598, which brought 600-700 settlers. Almost half the early settlers were from Spain, including many from New Spain, with most of the rest from various parts of Latin America, the Canary Islands, and Portugal. Following the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, New Mexico was resettled again starting in 1692, primarily by refugees from the Pueblo Revolt and others born in northern New Spain. The Spanish-speaking areas with which New Mexico had the greatest contact were Chihuahua and Sonora.Likely as a result of these historical origins and connections, Traditional New Mexican Spanish shares many morphological features with the rural Spanish of Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango, and other parts of Mexico. Colonial New Mexico was very isolated and had widespread illiteracy, resulting in most New Mexicans of the time having little to no exposure to "standard" Spanish. This linguistic isolation facilitated New Mexican Spanish's preservation of older vocabulary as well as its own innovations.
During that time, contact with the rest of Spanish America was limited because of the Comancheria, and New Mexican Spanish developed closer trading links to the Comanche than to the rest of New Spain. In the meantime, some Spanish colonists co-existed with and intermarried with Puebloan peoples and Navajos, also enemies of the Comanche.
Like most languages, New Mexican Spanish gradually evolved. As a result the Traditional New Mexican Spanish of the 20th and 21st centuries is not identical to the Spanish of the early colonial period. Many of the changes that occurred in older New Mexican Spanish are reflected in writing. For example, New Mexican Spanish speakers born before the Pueblo Revolt were generally not yeístas; that is, they pronounced the and sounds differently. After the Pueblo Revolt, New Mexico was re-settled with many new settlers coming in from central Mexico, in addition to returning New Mexican colonists. These new settlers generally did merge the two sounds, and dialect leveling resulted in later generations of New Mexicans consistently merging and. Colonial New Mexican Spanish also adopted some changes which occurred in the rest of the Spanish speaking world, like the elimination of the future subjunctive tense and the second-person forms of address vuestra merced and vuestra señoría; while the standard subjunctive form haya and the nonstandard form haiga of the auxiliary verb haber have always coexisted in New Mexican Spanish, the prevalence of the nonstandard haiga increased significantly over the colonial period.
Before the middle of the 18th century, there is little evidence of the deletion and occasional epenthesis of and in contact with front vowels, although that is a characteristic of modern New Mexican and northern Mexican Spanish. The presence of such deletion in areas close and historically connected to New Mexico makes it unlikely that New Mexicans independently developed this feature. Although colonial New Mexico had a very low rate of internal migration, trade connections with Chihuahua were strengthening during this time. Many of the people who moved into New Mexico were traders from Chihuahua, who became socially very prominent. They likely introduced the weakening of and to New Mexico, where it was adapted by the rest of the community.
New Mexico's 1848 annexation by the U.S. led to a greater exposure to English. Nevertheless, the late-19th-century saw the development of print media, which allowed New Mexican Spanish to resist assimilation toward American English for many decades. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, noted, "About one-tenth of the Spanish-American and Indian population habitually use the English language."
After 1917, Spanish usage in the public sphere began to decline and it was banned in schools, with students often being punished for speaking the language. This punishment was occasionally physical. Newspapers published in Spanish switched to English or went out of business. From then on, Spanish became a language of home and community. The advance of English-language broadcast media accelerated the decline. Since then, New Mexican Spanish has been undergoing a language shift, with Hispanos gradually shifting towards English. In addition, New Mexican Spanish faces pressure from Standard and Mexican Spanish. Younger generations tend to use more Anglicisms and Mexican and standard Spanish forms. The words most characteristic of Traditional New Mexican Spanish, with few exceptions, are less likely to be found in the speech of young people. This is in part due to language attrition. The decline in Spanish exposure in the home creates a vacuum, into which "English and Mexican Spanish flow easily."
File:RubenCobos.jpg|thumb|New Mexican linguist and folklorist Rubén Cobos published the first dictionary of New Mexican Spanish, A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish.
In 1983 New Mexican linguist and folklorist Rubén Cobos published the first dictionary of New Mexican Spanish, A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish. Cobos wrote in the introduction that
Cobos released a second edition of A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish in 2003. New Mexican Spanish of northern New Mexico, including Albuquerque, is being heavily influenced by Mexican Spanish, incorporating numerous Mexicanisms, while at the same time retaining some archaisms characteristic of traditional New Mexican Spanish. The use of Mexicanisms is most prominent in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, compared to other areas in the north. Some older Spanish speakers have noted Mexican immigrants showing surprise at non-immigrants speaking Spanish. In Albuquerque, the use of Mexicanisms correlates only with age, with younger speakers, regardless of their parents' background, being more likely to use Mexicanisms.
Today many native speakers of New Mexican Spanish use the language largely as a sacred language, with many traditional devotions and prayers being in Spanish, and many native speakers are actively using the language with their children. During the 1900s there were many television programs in New Mexican Spanish such as the Val De La O Show as well as New Mexican musicians such as Al Hurricane, but now there are fears it could become an endangered dialect of Spanish. Influence from Mexican immigrants is changing the dialect to become more similar to standard Mexican Spanish
Geographic distribution
New Mexican Spanish refers to the Spanish varieties spoken throughout the state of New Mexico and in the southern portion of Colorado; the label is applied to southern Colorado due to it having historically been part of New Mexico until statehood in 1876, and because most Spanish-speaking Coloradoans in the area trace their ancestry to Spanish-speaking New Mexican settlers.Dialects
There are two main Spanish dialects in New Mexico and southern Colorado.One is what Bills and Vigil call Traditional New Mexican Spanish, spoken in the northern and central parts of the region, whose speakers generally represent early colonial settlement. TNMS has been the subject of extensive study.
Despite TNMS' distinctiveness, it does fit into a Mexican "macro-dialect" due to its historical origins and features, and has been called "an offshoot of the Spanish of northern Mexico".
The other has been called Border Spanish, found in the southern third of New Mexico plus the Grants area in northwestern New Mexico and Crowley and Otero County, Colorado along the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. Although it is primarily the result of 20th-century Mexican immigration and its speakers typically have closer contact with Mexican Spanish, some Border Spanish speakers have ancestry in the region dating back hundreds of years.
Both of these varieties contain various sub-dialects, although the Traditional area has greater variation between different communities, and it also has high idiolectal variation within the same community. This variation is a consequence of both historical isolation and the modern language shift towards English.
The biggest dialect division within Traditional New Mexican Spanish, identified by Bills and Vigil on the basis of lexicon, is between the Río Arriba or upper river dialect and the rest of TNMS. This corresponds to the colonial separation between the Río Arriba and the Río Abajo, or lower river. The dialect boundary is an approximately east-west line running through Santa Fe. The Río Arriba dialect includes a North Central dialect in the middle portion of its dialect area and a Northeastern dialect in its eastern portion. There is also evidence, albeit less clear-cut, of a distinct West Central dialect centered around an area to the southwest of Albuquerque.
There also exists regional phonological variation within TNMS. For example, syllable-initial -aspiration, while occurring throughout New Mexico and Southern Colorado, is particularly notable along the upper Rio Grande between Albuquerque and Taos.
Although the Spanish of Albuquerque has traditionally been considered part of the Traditional area, the high presence of Mexicanisms in Albuquerque Spanish has led some to consider it to constitute a third dialect zone, between Traditional and Border Spanish. In fact, the use of Mexicanisms is widespread across the Traditional Spanish zone, especially in Albuquerque and Santa Fe and among the younger generations.
Some diversity in Border Spanish is to be expected, given the continuous Hispanic presence in southern New Mexico since the colonial period, and the movement of some Traditional Spanish speakers to south of Las Cruces after the Mexican-American War. One sub-dialect of Border Spanish, identified by Bills and Vigil based on lexical criteria, can be found in the southwestern corner of the state, including Doña Ana County and the areas to its west. This is the region closest to the border with Mexico. The southwestern sub-dialect is characterized by a number of word choices, all but one of which are typical of Mexican Spanish usage. For example, while most of New Mexico uses the term bolsa for 'purse', and the Río Arriba area north of Santa Fe uses maleta, while the southwestern corner of New Mexico uses the standard cartera. Also, southwestern New Mexico tends to use la craca for 'cracker', while the rest of New Mexico tends to use el craque. Forms with galleta 'cookie', such as galleta de sal 'salt cookie', are found throughout New Mexico.