Simon Romero reports for the NY Times (archived) on a dialect of Spanish that is slipping away:
QUESTA, N.M. — When the old regulars gather at Cynthia Rael-Vigil’s coffee shop in Questa, N.M., a village nestled in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, they sip lattes and lavender lemonade and gossip in Spanish. Someone from Mexico City or Madrid sitting at the next table could be hard-pressed to follow their rare dialect. But Spanish speakers from four centuries ago might have recognized the unusual verb conjugations — if not the unorthodox pronunciations and words drawn from English and languages indigenous to North America.
For more than 400 years, these mountains have cradled a form of Spanish that today exists nowhere else on earth. Even after the absorption of their lands into the United States in the 19th century, generations of speakers somehow kept the dialect alive, through poetry and song and the everyday exchanges on the streets of Hispanic enclaves scattered throughout the region.
Even just a few decades ago, the New Mexican dialect remained at the forefront of Spanish-language media in the United States, featured on television programs like the nationally syndicated 1960s Val de la O variety show. Balladeers like Al Hurricane nurtured the dialect in their songs. But such fixtures, along with the dazzling array of Spanish-language newspapers that once flourished in northern New Mexico, have largely faded. […]
I grew up in an old adobe home in Ribera, a village near the Pecos River, speaking some New Mexican Spanish — enough to get by, though not as splendidly as some classmates. Some of my earliest memories involve listening to my grandmother as she chatted in the dialect while flipping tortillas with her fingers on a wood stove.
Despite being born in New Mexico and spending nearly her entire life in the state, my grandmother spoke hardly any English. She is gone now, and with her and those of her generation, the region is losing a linguistic treasure trove harkening back centuries.
New Mexican Spanish is often described as a sampling of 17th century Golden Age Spanish imported directly from the Old World, and somehow meticulously safeguarded in isolation. That depiction may include kernels of truth, linguists say, but the origins and development of the dialect, which they consider an offshoot of the Spanish of northern Mexico, are far more nuanced and complex than the myth.
It is thought to have crystallized around the late 16th century, when a linguistically and ethnically mixed colonizing expedition put down stakes here as part of the European competition for the New World — years before the first permanent English settlement in North America was established in 1607 in Jamestown, Va.
The colonists included Europeans from Spain, Portugal and Greece, but also Mexican-born people of mixed Indigenous, European and African ancestry, as well as Indigenous people, thought to be Tlaxcalan Indians, who spoke Náhuatl, the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire.
The settlers relied on supply caravans known as conductas to maintain ties with Mexico City. But the small colony could be completely cut off from the outside world for stretches of several years, raising comparisons with places such as the Andean highlands or southern Chile, where the Spanish language evolved in similar isolation. […]
In the places where it took root, in northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado, speakers use words like ratón volador (flying mouse) for bat instead of murciélago, as in standard Spanish, and gallina de la sierra (mountain chicken) for turkey instead of pavo or guajalote. They incorporated Indigenous words like chimal (shield) from Náhuatl, chimayó (obsidian flake) from Tewa and cíbolo (buffalo) from Zuñi, as well as bisnes (business), crismes (Christmas), sanamagón (son of a gun) and many others from English. […]
The dialect has managed to survive for the nearly two centuries since the United States took possession of New Mexico in 1848, making it the oldest continuously transmitted variety of Spanish in the country. Still, in an era when immigration from Latin America has boosted the number of hispanohablantes in the United States to more than 41 million, the fortunes of New Mexican Spanish — and the region where it once flourished — have been going in another direction. […] Despite the hardships, there are still some in the region trying to provide the dialect a lifeline. […]
“The language absolutely will survive,” said Larry Torres, a linguist who writes a bilingual column for The Taos News and Santa Fe New Mexican. “It may not be the same language that our ancestors recognized, but we’re using a form of 15th century Spanish with 21st century English.”
Others are not so sanguine about the dialect’s chances of survival, at least not in the form in which it has been recognizable for centuries. Mark Waltermire, a linguistics professor at New Mexico State University, said he expected New Mexican Spanish to survive for at least two more decades, if only because there are people in their 50s who still speak it.
Beyond that time frame, however, he said it is hard to see a path forward for the dialect — which does not mean Spanish will disappear from New Mexico. “It’s just being replaced,” he said, citing the arrival of new immigrants from Mexico, “with a different kind of Spanish.”
For “Val de la O,” see this LH post on the odd surname de la O. Interestingly, Patrick Hall mentioned the dialect here in 2004:
I’m glad this topic came up, because I ended up looking up a favorite Spanish dictionary, “A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish,” by Ruben Cobos, and now that I have, I see that there is a new edition:
Revised Dictionary of San Luis Valley Spanish
The variety of Spanish described in the book is fascinating, and has a very long history indeed. Highly recommended.
I’m not reproducing his book link, because if you click on it you get some suspicious demands. But you can get a copy of the first edition for a mere $121.00! (The new edition Patrick mentioned is “Currently unavailable.”) Thanks, Bonnie!
“New Mexican Spanish is often described as a sampling of 17th century Golden Age Spanish imported directly from the Old World, and somehow meticulously safeguarded in isolation. That depiction may include kernels of truth, linguists say, but the origins and development of the dialect, which they consider an offshoot of the Spanish of northern Mexico, are far more nuanced and complex than the myth.”
New Mexican is the Appalachian of Spanish!
Exactly!
“Tamale Out of Time”
I was about to wince at “meticulously safeguarded”, but then came the next sentence, “linguists say … far more nuanced and complex” — Yes! I punched the air!
Náhuatl: Written with an acute accent in Spanish, not in English. No doubt it’s because the writer was doing a lot of thinking in Spanish while writing, but the copyeditor should’ve checked, and not ignored the spell-checker if it flagged it (some do, some don’t; this comment box does).
New Mexican is the Appalachian of Spanish!
Sociolinguistically, the Appalachian of Spanish (in Spain, anyway) is Andalusian, covert prestige and all. (Don’t expect this paper to mention any of the actual features of the variety.) Check out the quotes from the interviewees, Rodger, they will probably sound familiar.
Written with an acute accent in Spanish, not in English.
That’s like claiming Łódź is incorrect in English and correcting it to Lodz (as this comment box would have me do). There is plenty of precedent for the latter, but there is no longer any reason not to use the Polishly-correct form, either.
Why should Spanish spelling be the boss of English, especially for a word that is a loanword into Spanish, and arrived in English only partly via Spanish, partly directly? Nahuatl has its own orthography, which doesn’t use an acute accent in this way and never has, so if you want to use the “original” spelling, that’s “Nahuatl”. In any case, “Nahuatl” has been a well-established name in English, spelled so in dictionaries, for well over 150 years — unlike Łódź, which is predominantly spelled with Polish diacritics even in English texts. Analogy fails.
I’m afraid I must agree with ktschwarz about Nahuatl.
To further pick at this, <hua> for /wa/ is already a hispanism, so not including the accent still doesn’t make it purely N—tl. Terry Kaufman consistently phonemicized the spelling of language names (Yuto-Nawa for Uto-Aztecan, etc.), but it didn’t catch on.
Cf.: In Hawai‘i, the official and scholarly convention is that the name of the state and the island are a native word, to be spelled with the ‘okina, but that Hawaiian is an English word, and is to be spelled without it.
Thanks for the link to the article. I wish I was willing to register with the website so that I could hear the sound samples but I’m not ( as of yet ) so I skimmed the article at the archived link. I’ll have to go back and read it again when I have time later as I have questions and doubts about some things stated in the article. From what I have read and seen before about traditional New Mexican Spanish, it is a lot like the rural Spanish of Northern Mexico. My mom is from rural Durango in Northern Mexico so that type of speech is familiar to me.
Edited to add:
I have to say that I’m a bit skeptical about the last sentence in this paragraph:
When the old regulars gather at Cynthia Rael-Vigil’s coffee shop in Questa, N.M., a village nestled in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, they sip lattes and lavender lemonade and gossip in Spanish. Someone from Mexico City or Madrid sitting at the next table could be hard-pressed to follow their rare dialect.
I’d love to hear this conversation to learn jwhat makes it hard for somebody from Mexico City to follow.
I don’t know how they compare, but Cobos’s Dictionary of New Mexico & Southern Colorado Spanish (here) is quite cheaper, and much of it can be previewed on GB (here).
I know one person who learned Californio Spanish, and finds Mexican Spanish odd. I don’t know how many are left.
In addition to its archaic survivals and indigenous loanwords (and sundry lexical innovations, doubtless), New Mexico Spanish also has at least one New World Gallicism: a reflex of “la poêle” (the frying pan), which, as I just pointed out at the “Muskogean and Lamb’s quarters” thread, may rank is one of the most if not THE most widespread North American gallicism in indigenous North American languages, on account of frying pans being a VERY desirable trade item which travelling traders from “La Nouvelle-France” exchanged for furs/pelts.
Hmm. This makes me wonder: did New Mexico Spanish speakers acquire the word directly from French speakers, or did the word enter their variety of Spanish indirectly, via some indigenous language? The answer might be of interest to some historians…
My casually mentioning “Mexican Spanish” makes me wonder: do predominantly Mexican Spanish communities in California maintain regional variants, or did a general koiné develop?
sanamagón
Why /m/?
I also vaguely recall some stereotypical (Puerto Rican?) sanamabích.
From what I have read and seen before about traditional New Mexican Spanish, it is a lot like the rural Spanish of Northern Mexico.
That was my reaction as well, but of course it’s very common in such cases to wildly exaggerate the uniqueness of a dialect.
I wish I was willing to register with the website so that I could hear the sound samples
Not worth it — it just has the English word followed by the usual Spanish word followed by the dialect word (or phrase), and there’s nothing especially distinctive about the sound of the latter.
<hua> for /wa/ is already a hispanism
Well, it’s derived from Spanish, but it was adopted by Nahuatl writers (that is, <uh> or <u> or <hu> have all been used for /w/ in the language, and <w> hasn’t; according to Wikipedia, the Mexican Ministry of Public Education currently uses <u> in bilingual education). If it doesn’t count as “purely” Nahuatl, then neither does anything else written in the Latin alphabet.
this comment box
I should’ve said “this browser”, since that’s what puts the red underlines in the comment box; Firefox (on my laptop), Microsoft Edge (laptop), and Safari (tablet) often have divergent opinions.
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa Sr. (1880–1958) was not only born into the Spanish-speaking community of New Mexico but he was also trained in linguistics, so that his many publications on its language and culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Aurelio_Macedonio_Espinosa_Sr.) are reliable to a high degree.
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa Jr. (1907-2004), like his father, a trained Hispanist, may have published too in the field of New Mexican Spanish language and culture.
sanamagón
In Americanized Italian it is sanemagogna ‘an American’, also sanemabiccia ‘id.’
> Why /m/?
I assume the English /v/ turned into Spanish /b/ and then underwent some kind of nasal assimilation?
> [From the article]: the standard “No sé donde está la casa.”
“No sé dónde está la casa.”, with an accent on “donde”, right?
> [From the article]: […] the unusual verb conjugations […] conjugate creatively, employing unusual verb endings
They tease us like this, and then give us nothing??? That’s just mean.
Dainichi, Wikipedia has you covered.
Re sana+ syllabic m + (schwa) + C, maybe you can postulate something like *[sana+BETA+C] > *[sana + syllabic m + BETA + C] followed by deletion of BETA. Is the plural form sonsab****es originally ex L2 speech?
It hasn’t been explicitly pointed out, I think, that “Nahuatl” is the usual Nahuatl spelling, i.e. without a totally gratuitous (for Nahuatl) indication of stress.
And I would have thought that the Andalusian of English was Yorkshire. New Mexican and Appalachian are both North American languages.
Actually, ktschwarz pointed that out above:
The thing about writing “Náhuatl” with an accent is that it might be an identity thing on the part of the writer, like maybe its written that way because he is an Hispano/Nuevomejicano/Chicano/Mexican who writes that way because other Hispanos/Nuevomejicanos/Chicanos/Mexicans write that way in Spanish and English. Sort of the way Mexicans insist in continuing to write Méjico and mejicano in Spanish with an “x” (México and mexicano) despite the “j” spelling being legitimate and more consistent for Spanish.
Honestly its something that I might do and that I probably have done just like when I introduce myself in real life with my real name in English I nonetheless tend to use the Spanish pronunciation ( I have a Spanish name ) of my name rather than an anglicised pronunciation despite speaking in English. I suppose that I am asserting the me-ness of me to the world, in those situations.
Also, when I dabbled with Náhuatl in the past I deliberately used the accent when learning vocabulary simply because the force of habit was too strong for me with the common loan words into Mexican Spanish. For example, I would write things like tecólotl instead of plain tecolotl because I kept pronouncing it with stress on the final “o” like with the Spanish version tecolote (owl.)
Sure, that all makes sense.
Probably it is an identity thing, which is more or less I was trying to say with “doing a lot of thinking in Spanish” (and, as you say, reading Spanish writing), but IMNSHO a news story in the New York Times is not the place to express your identity in that specific way. In that particular venue, writers should expect to have spellings of standard English words smoothed out into standard spelling. “Nahuatl” isn’t slang or a localism, it’s a general English word.
(This is not a straight objective news story; it does have a personal voice, the part about the writer’s grandmother. Nevertheless, I stand by my opinion about spelling. That doesn’t, of course, apply to personal names, placenames, and Spanish words in italics.)
The New York Times is evidently wobbly on the spelling of Nahuatl, sticking an accent on it roughly 8% of the time in a site search at nytimes.com (excluding stories in Spanish). I attribute that to exoticization and ignorance of the fact that it is an English word that is in all English dictionaries.
I hope this doesn’t come across as detracting from the overall excellent quality of the story. It’s only a tiny oversight, and it’s a sign of the author’s knowledge of Spanish. More like this, please!
did New Mexico Spanish speakers acquire the word directly from French speakers, or did the word enter their variety of Spanish indirectly, via some indigenous language?
Here is the treatment of puela from Garland D. Bills and Neddy A. Vigil (2008) The Spanish Language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A Linguistic Atlas, on p. 160:
Bills and Vigil’s whole book is a very fun! (Traditional Spanish in the citation above is what is called New Mexican Spanish in the article from the Times: the traditional dialect typical of central and northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, as opposed to the Spanish of southern New Mexico, typically more similar to the Spanish of Chihuahua, in my experience from living in Santa Fe.)
(Holloway 1997:94 does not offer any more etymological information for Brule Spanish puela.)
The thing about writing “Náhuatl” with an accent is that it might be an identity thing on the part of the writer, like maybe its written that way because he is an Hispano/Nuevomejicano/Chicano/Mexican who writes that way because other Hispanos/Nuevomejicanos/Chicanos/Mexicans write that way in Spanish and English. Sort of the way Mexicans insist in continuing to write Méjico and mejicano in Spanish with an “x” (México and mexicano) despite the “j” spelling being legitimate and more consistent for Spanish.
One prominent example of this is the religious historian Davíd [sic] Carrasco.
But surely no Spanish-speakers normally write Davíd; is that his way of nudging English speakers to stress it correctly? I note that his father was David [sic] Livingston Carrasco.
WARNING: some readers will find the following to be in bad or even execrable taste!
Re the last paragraph of Sr. Carrasco Sr’s Wikipedia entry, is it possible that too many people calling him David instead of Davíd (or vice-versa) was the reason for this desperate act?
I had never heard of the Val de la O Show, but apparently it reflected the dialect because it happened to be locally produced by an Albuquerque tv station and then got syndicated nationally (as well as across the border to stations in Mexico) from there. The Hispanophone population of the U.S. was much much smaller when that show got started in the early Sixties than it is today, so the percentage of the U.S. Hispanophone population that was from New Mexico was much much higher than it is now.
Languagehat wrote:
“Sure, that all makes sense.”
Thank you.
“…it’s very common in such cases to wildly exaggerate the uniqueness of a dialect.”
This may also have to do with the fact that some or many native Hispanics of New Mexico don’t consider themselves Mexican or Mexican-American or Chicano. They consider themselves Spanish. As a result they may emphasize the differences between their Spanish and that of Northern Mexico and Mexico in general.
My ex-sister-in-law encountered this attitude when my brother was stationed in New Mexico. She met some people who told her “excuse me but we are not Mexican!” which left her bewildered because she is English and couldn’t really tell the differences between them and our family.
An interesting phenomenon and a great story!
>She met some people who told her “excuse me but we are not Mexican!”
There are other possible reasons behind such a response than a “Spanish” identity or antipathy to being considered Mexican-American. Many New Mexico residents bridle at outsiders who don’t recognize New Mexico as a state and a part of the US, instead thinking it’s literally part of Mexico. You could get that reaction even from people whose ancestry in Mexico is more recent if you implied they were Mexican without appending “-American”.
Though perhaps your ex-in-law had a longer interaction and confirmed how these people felt about it.
Jeremy Jojola narrates a video clip (6:42) about the dialect (you can see a shot of the Cobos dictionary); thanks, Eric!