New Mexican Spanish
New Mexican Spanish is a variety of Spanish spoken in the United States, primarily in Northern New Mexico and the southern part of the state of Colorado by the Hispanos of New Mexico. Despite a continual influence from the Spanish spoken in Mexico to the south by contact with Mexican migrants who fled to the US from the Mexican Revolution, New Mexico's unique political history and relative geographical and political isolation from the time of the annexation to the US have caused New Mexican Spanish to differ notably from the Spanish spoken in other parts of Hispanic America, with the exception of certain rural areas of southern Colorado, Northern Mexico, and Texas.
Many speakers of traditional New Mexican Spanish are descendants of Spanish colonists who arrived in New Mexico in the 16th to the 18th centuries. 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.
After the Mexican–American War, New Mexico and all its inhabitants came under the governance of the English-speaking United States, and for the next 100 years, English-speakers increased in number.
Those reasons caused these main differences between New Mexican Spanish and other forms of Hispanic American Spanish: the preservation of forms and vocabulary from colonial-era Spanish, the borrowing of words from Rio Grande Indian languages for indigenous vocabulary, a tendency to "recoin" Spanish words for ones that had fallen into disuse, and a large proportion of English loanwords, particularly for technology. Pronunciation also carries influences from colonial, Native American, and English sources.
In recent years, speakers have developed a modern New Mexican Spanish, called Renovador, which contains more modern vocabulary because of the increasing popularity of Spanish-language broadcast media in the US and intermarriage between New Mexicans and Mexican settlers. The modernized dialect contains Mexican Spanish slang.
History
The late-19th-century development of a culture of print media allowed New Mexican Spanish to resist assimilation toward either American English or Mexican Spanish 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." Until the 1930s or the 1940s, many speakers never learned English, and even afterward, most of their descendants were bilingual with English until the 1960s or the 1970s. The advance of English-language broadcast media accelerated the decline.The increasing popularity of Spanish-language broadcast media in the US and intermarriage of Mexican settlers and descendants of colonial Spanish settlers have somewhat increased the number of those speaking New Mexican Spanish.
Morphology
Besides a great deal of phonological variation, there are various morphological differences throughout New Mexican Spanish, usually in the verb conjugations or endings:- Change from a bilabial nasal to an alveolar nasal in the first-person plural ending of the imperfect: nos bañábamos is pronounced under the influence of clitic nos.
- Regularization of the following irregular verb conjugations:
- * Radical stem changes absent: the equivalent of quiero is quero, which is clearly an archaism. In fact, this feature remains in some parts of northwestern Spain such as Asturias and Galicia.
- * Regularization of irregular first-person singular present indicative: epenthetic /g/ is missing, thus salo rather than salgo, veno instead of vengo.
- * Subjunctive present of haber is haiga, instead of haya.
- * Preservation of /a/ in forms of haber as an auxiliary verb: "nosotros hamos comido," instead of "nosotros hemos comido," "yo ha comido" instead of "yo he comido."
Phonology
- New Mexican Spanish has seseo. That is, casa and caza are homophones. Seseo is prevalent in nearly all of Spanish America, in the Canary Islands, and some of southern Spain. where the linguistic feature originates.
| Feature | Example | Phonemic | Standard | N.M. Spanish |
| Phrase-final epenthetical or | voy a cantar | |||
| Phrase-final epenthetical or | dame el papel | |||
| Uvularization of | mujeres | |||
| Conditional elision of intervocalic | ella | |||
| Conditional elision of intervocalic | estrellita | |||
| Realization of or as an alveolar approximant | Rodrigo | |||
| "Softening" of to | muchachos | |||
| Insertion of nasal consonant / nasalisation of vowel preceding postalveolar affricate/fricative | muchos | |||
| Insertion of nasal consonant / nasalisation of vowel preceding postalveolar affricate/fricative | muchos | |||
| Elision of word-final intervocalic consonants, especially in -ado | ocupado | |||
| Elision of word-final intervocalic consonants, especially in -ado | ocupado | |||
| Elision of word-final intervocalic consonants, especially in -ado | todo | |||
| Aspiration or elision of | me fui | |||
| Aspiration or elision of | me fui | |||
| No -voicing | estas mismas casas | |||
| Velarization of prevelar consonant voiced bilabial approximant | abuelo | |||
| Syllable-initial, syllable-final, or total aspiration or elision of | somos así | |||
| Syllable-initial, syllable-final, or total aspiration or elision of | somos así | |||
| Syllable-initial, syllable-final, or total aspiration or elision of | somos así | |||
| Syllable-initial, syllable-final, or total aspiration or elision of | somos así | |||
| Syllable-initial, syllable-final, or total aspiration or elision of | somos así | |||
| Syllable-initial, syllable-final, or total aspiration or elision of | somos así |
Language contact
New Mexican Spanish has been in contact with several indigenous American languages, most prominently those of the Pueblo and Navajo peoples with whom the Spaniards and Mexicans coexisted in colonial times. For an example of loanword phonological borrowing in Taos, see Taos loanword phonology.Legal status
New Mexico law grants Spanish a special status. For instance, constitutional amendments must be approved by referendum and must be printed on the ballot in both English and Spanish. Certain legal notices must be published in English and Spanish, and the state maintains a list of newspapers for Spanish publication. Spanish was not used officially in the legislature after 1935.Though the New Mexico Constitution provided that laws would be published in both languages for 20 years and that practice was renewed several times, it ceased in 1949. Accordingly, some describe New Mexico as officially bilingual, but others disagree.