New Mexican Spanish
New Mexican Spanish () refers to a variety of Spanish spoken in the United States in New Mexico and the southern part of the state of Colorado. It includes a Traditional dialect spoken generally by the Hispanos of New Mexico, descendants of colonists who arrived in New Mexico before its annexation by the US, in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and a Border dialect spoken in southern New Mexico. Despite a continual influence from Mexican Spanish to the south, New Mexico's unique political history and relative geographical and political isolation from the time of its annexation  to the US have caused Traditional New Mexican Spanish to differ notably from the Spanish spoken in other parts of Hispanic America, with the exception of certain rural areas of Northern Mexico and Texas. Those reasons caused these main distinctive features of Traditional New Mexican Spanish, compared to other forms of Hispanic American Spanish: the preservation of forms and vocabulary from colonial-era Spanish no longer present in the standard (such as, in some places, instead of or , instead of ), the borrowing of words from Puebloan languages for some indigenous vocabulary (in addition to the Nahuatl additions that the colonists  had brought), independent lexical and morphological innovations, and a large proportion of English loanwords, particularly for technology (such as , , and ). In recent years, the Traditional Spanish of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado has taken in more vocabulary from Mexican Spanish due to the increasing popularity of Spanish-language broadcast media in the US and intermarriage and interaction between Hispanos and Mexican immigrants, resulting in greater similarity between the Traditional and Border dialects. This new dialect has been called . History. The Spanish language first arrived in New Mexico with Juan de Oñate's colonization, bringing 600-700 settlers. Almost half  of the early settlers were from Spain, many from New Spain, the rest from "various parts of Latin America, the Canary Islands, Portugal, and so forth." Following the Pueblo Revolt, New Mexico was resettled again, 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. Colonial New Mexico was very isolated and had widespread illiteracy, resulting in most New Mexicans 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. New Mexico's 1848 annexation by the US led to a greater exposure to English. Nevertheless, the late-19th-century development of a culture of print media 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 [of New Mexico] habitually use the English language." At the beginning of the 20th century, there was an attempt by both Anglos and Hispanos to link New Mexico's history and language to Spain, rather than Mexico. This led to the occasional use of rather than in some newspaper ads. Since isn't actually part of New Mexican Spanish, in these advertisements it was used interchangeably with , occasionally with both being used in the same ad. That artificial usage differs drastically from the  natural usage of in Spain. 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. 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." As of 2010, the Spanish variety of northern New Mexico, including Albuquerque, has been 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 Mexicanism. Geographic distribution. New Mexican Spanish refers to the Spanish varieties spoken throughout the state of New Mexico and in the southern portion of Colorado. This label is applied to southern Colorado as well because Colorado was historically part of New Mexico until statehood in 1876 and because Spanish-speakers from New Mexico settled southern Colorado, resulting in most Spanish-speaking southern Coloradans having ancestry from New Mexico. Dialects . There are two main Spanish dialects in New Mexico and southern Colorado. One is what Bills and Vigil call Traditional New Mexican Spanish (abbreviated TNMS), 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. The other has been called Border Spanish, which is primarily the result of 20th-century Mexican immigration and whose speakers typically have closer contact with Mexican Spanish. Both of these varieties contain various sub-dialects, although 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. Traditional New Mexican Spanish's sub-dialects, categorized according to lexicon or the use of different words, include a variety, with a North Central dialect in the middle portion of the dialect's area and a Northeastern dialect in its eastern portion, and a less clear-cut West Central dialect centered around 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 especially 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 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 lexical variants, all but one of which are typical of Mexican Spanish usage. For example, while most of New Mexico uses the term for 'purse', and the area north of Santa Fe uses , while the southwestern corner of New Mexico  uses the standard . Also, southwestern New Mexico tends to use for 'cracker', while the rest of New Mexico tends to use . Forms with 'cookie', such as 'salt cookie', are found throughout New Mexico. Morphology. Besides a great deal of phonological variation, there are various differences between Traditional New Mexican Spanish morphology and standard Spanish morphology, usually in verb conjugations or endings. Use of non-standard forms isn't universal, and usually correlates negatively with education. New Mexican Spanish speakers generally are aware of standard Spanish norms, and with few exceptions express a preference for sentences which follow those norms. That  said, they often break these norms in daily conversation, and prefer and to the standard 'we leave' and 'we request'. The most characteristic traits of TNMS speech are generally more commonly found among older speakers: Many features of New Mexican Spanish are shared with the Spanish spoken throughout the United States. For example, for 'to call back' and other such seemingly-calqued expressions with are widespread. In expressions where use of the subjunctive mood is considered obligatory according to prescriptive grammar norms, New Mexicans with greater proficiency in Spanish and greater education in Spanish are more likely to actually use  the subjunctive. Phonology. The following tendencies are common in Traditional New Mexican Spanish, though are not universal: Traditional New Mexican Spanish has a number of syllabic consonants. A syllabic can arise as the result of or before a bilabial consonant, as in 'a kiss' or 'my dad' . , and can also become syllabic before a sequence of followed by a coronal consonant. These often, but not always, occur before the diminutive endings and . Some examples are , 'permission' , and 'little ball' . Finally, a syllabic appears, but only before , as in . For many speakers the syllabic derived from has acquired an epenthetic , becoming  . This is often reflected in writing, as or . Vocabulary. One of the most notable characteristics of Traditional New Mexican Spanish is its vocabulary. New Mexican Spanish has retained a lot of older vocabulary, or common vocabulary with older meanings, that has been lost in other Spanish varieties. This is one of the reasons it's often called "archaic". It's also developed a lot of vocabulary of its own, inherited many Nahuatl loanwords from Mexican Spanish, and taken in more loanwords from neighboring indigenous languages and from English. New Mexican Spanish retains many older variants of common function words no  longer current in standard Spanish, such as for , for , for , or for and for . Many of these terms are found in the colloquial speech of other regions as well. TNMS has also retained many content words that have been lost in other varieties. For example, TNMS retains the word , meaning 'goose'. is a feminine form of the term , which referred to wild geese, while referred to the domesticated goose. That distinction seems to no longer be made, and has become the typical term throughout most of the Spanish-speaking world. The term is also retained in Zwolle-Ebarb Spanish. Independent  lexical innovations have occurred in TNMS. One example is the coining of to mean 'bat'. Also found in New Mexico is the standard term, , and a variant. may be a retention of the original form, before metathesis switched the "l" and the "g", or it may be a metathesized variant of the standard form. The standard form, and , are mainly found in the Border Spanish area, in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and along the Arkansas River in Colorado. Several definite examples of metathesis have occurred in New Mexican Spanish: from 'stomach', from 'language', from 'wall', from 'poor' and from 'to  melt'. New Mexican Spanish, including both the Traditional and the Border varieties, has also regularized the gender of some nouns, such as 'language' and "system". That is, many speakers treat them as feminine, even though it's normatively considered a masculine noun. Residents of Martineztown, Albuquerque in the early 80s viewed the feminine form, , as slightly more correct than the traditional masculine. After 1848, New Mexican Spanish has had to adopt or coin its own terms for new technological developments. One such development is the invention of the automobile. Like much of Latin America, New Mexico extended the meaning of  'cart' to include cars. New Mexican Spanish also ended up extending the term , which referred to driving animals, to include driving cars. This is the same solution that was chosen in English, and in the Zwolle-Ebarb dialect. The word , a loanword for 'telephone', is also used across New Mexico and southern Colorado, with little geographical patterning, being found as far south as Las Cruces. More educated speakers tend to use the standard . The word 'bear' is occasionally pronounced in TNMS, with the nonstandard form being more common among old people. 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 centuries, Hispanics had hostile relations with the Navajo and other nomadic peoples, such as the Apache. As a result, New Mexican Spanish has borrowed few terms from their languages. gives only two examples of loans from Navajo: 'small valley' and , as in the phrase 'to be sowing one's wild oats'. The term , referring to the Gila Apache, is cited as a loan from an Apache language. In the opposite direction, Navajo, which typically does n't adopt many loanwords, has borrowed some terms from Spanish as well. For example, the Navajo terms for "money" () and "Anglo" () are borrowings from Spanish and respectively. Hispanic contact with the Puebloans was much closer, though linguistic contact was somewhat uneven. Most of the bilinguals who mediated between Hispanics and Puebloans were themselves Puebloans since few Hispanics spoke a Pueblo language. As a result, Puebloan languages borrowed many words from Spanish, while New Mexican Spanish borrowed fewer words from Pueblo languages. For an example of loanword phonological borrowing in Taos, see Taos loanword phonology. Most Puebloan loanwords in New Mexican  Spanish have to do with people and place names, cultural artifacts, foods, and plants and herbs. One such loan is the term , which comes from either a Zuni word for "bits of ground corn or cornmeal used for ceremonial purposes" or a Rio Grande Tewa term for grains of corn. It's most commonly used to mean "coffee grounds". This usage is also attested in northern Chihuahua. It's also used to mean "crumbs" by speakers from south-western New Mexico, although speakers elsewhere prefer the standard . New Mexico came into contact with the French language in the early 18th  century due to interactions with French Fur trappers and traders. These interactions increased after Mexican independence. Some family names, such as Archibeque, Gurulé, and Tixier, are attributable to French influence. New Mexican Spanish has otherwise borrowed few words from French, though two prominent ones are , meaning "skillet", and , meaning "slipper". The only other Spanish variety where is used is the Brule variety of Isleño Spanish, which has been greatly influenced by French. The term is also used in New Mexico for "slipper", but it's associated with the border region, and is widely used across Latin America and Spain. New  Mexican Spanish has also been in substantial contact with American English. The contact with American English began before the Mexican–American War, when New Mexico did trade with the US, and increased after New Mexico's annexation by the US. One effect of this is semantic extension, using Spanish words with the meaning of their English cognates, such as using to mean "to realize." Contact with English has also led to a general adoption of many loanwords, as well as a language shift towards English with abandonment of Spanish. Legal status. New Mexico law accommodates the use of Spanish. 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 (1912) 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. Others disagree and say that New Mexico's laws were designed to  facilitate a transition from Spanish to English, not to protect Spanish or give it any official status.