New Mexico Is Losing a Form of Spanish Spoken Nowhere Else on Earth

oldbrownhat

oldbrownhat

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Gift NYT article here. A long-ish but hopefully interesting read, esp. for Forum members who live in NM.

A dialect from the state’s earliest Spanish-speaking settlers has endured for over 400 years in the state’s remote mountain villages. But its time may be running out.
"...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...

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Grandkids were looking into their family history. They found few of their ancestors went by their birth names. Once things opened up. their family lines went to 1530's in the Santa Fe area.
 
Languages are fascinating. My fathers dialect (his native tongue) didn’t evolve after he came to the US in ‘47 at 32 years old. His last trip home in the early 90s had people commenting on his archaic way of speaking.
 
glenwolde said:
It's like North Carolina's Hoi Toider, aka the Ocracoke Brouge.
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Harker's Island in eastern NC is included in that dialect. Knew some folks from there that my Father-In-Law worked with in Morehead City. When they would talk to me I had to ask my F-I-L what they said. Was told that Linguists came to study them from different colleges.
 
rwsmith said:
They need to make videos of their language so that it will be preserved.
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From the article it looks like they're trying to preserve it:
...Despite the hardships, there are still some in the region trying to provide the dialect a lifeline.

Julie Chacon, executive director of the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area, an organization in Alamosa, Colo., grew up speaking New Mexican Spanish in the nearby village of Capulín, where it had spread across the state line to Southern Colorado in the 19th century. She is now collecting oral histories from viejitos (old ones), assembling workbooks to teach the dialect, and running a heritage camp for children.

Daniel Lee Gallegos and his band Sangre Joven of Las Vegas, N.M., hold jam sessions on Facebook for the nuevomexicano diaspora, and Carlos Medina, a comedian and musician, revels in the dialect’s playful creativity...​
 
arjay said:
Languages are fascinating. My fathers dialect (his native tongue) didn’t evolve after he came to the US in ‘47 at 32 years old. His last trip home in the early 90s had people commenting on his archaic way of speaking.
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My gf's mother is Russian, born in China after her parents fled the Revolution, eventually moving to Australia during WWII. She and her mom went to Russia in 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I recall Sandra telling me that some people thought Lu's Russian was slightly old-fashioned.
 
Golddollar said:
I always wondered what I must have sounded like when I went to Quebec province in Canada and tried to speak the local language.
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Me, too, when I was in Québec City for a couple of weeks in 1995. And I had done several years of French in school a few decades earlier! But back then (1960's) we didn't have immersion classes, nor any Canadian context to the French we learned, so no exposure to Québecois French. Had a fabulous time - there was a city-wide festival of mediaeval music and art but - mon Dieu! - linguistically it was hard work!
 
One of my Ex- Associates can speak Spanish anywhere.
One Tico (Costa Rican) to another - Be careful what you say around her.
She speaks better Spanish than we do!
 
The Spanish language commonly used in much of New Mexico and southern Colorado has been recognized as a regional dialect for several decades. More closely related to the Castiliano Spanish of the 16th-17th Centuries in Spain than most of the modern Latin American usage. The University of Southern Colorado (Pueblo) has been active in documenting and studying the unique Spanish of the region.

In several areas of southern Colorado (particularly the San Luis Valley) Spanish remained the primary language of many families well into the mid-20th Century. More recent Spanish-speaking immigrants may still experience some difficulties in communication with the folks who have 300 years of family roots in this area.

Since the widespread availability of television there has been both a decline in household and community usage of Spanish and a resurgence in interest in retaining this connection with family heritage and cultural identity.

Here in Pueblo, Colorado we hear Spanish spoken daily, and frequently the combinations formed in assimilating English words, phrases, etc, that is called Spanglish. After living here more than 50 years entiendo poco y hablo poco, no mucho y no muy bien.
 
I grew up in Northeastern Arizona and Northwest New Mexico from the late-1940s to the early-1960s. I learned Spanish in school and from locals.

I attended Vietnamese language school before serving as a Navy Advisor in Viet Nam. My instructor was originally from an upperclass family in Hanoi. When I got to Viet Nam, I found that it was like speaking Boston English in South Alabama.

I told some women that I had many female friends in the USA. They heard I had many hookers in the USA.
 
While on our numberous trips to Quebec Province I'm sure that it was obvious that I was not a native French speaker. But I did get complimented one time by a local for my attempt to speak French, so I certainly don't regret going back to school to try to relearn it.

But there was one time my competence in French came out to perfection. At the fishing camp I was sitting on a cabin porch with two of my uncles. I saw a young lady who worked at the camp walking down to the lake carrying a mop. I had met her before and knew she spoke little or no English. She took the mop down to the lake and started dunking the mop in the lake. This was just too good to pass up, so I yelled down, "Hey, nous boisson cette eau (hey, we drink that water)." She laughed at that, so I knew she understood me perfectly.
 
AJ said:
Harker's Island in eastern NC is included in that dialect. Knew some folks from there that my Father-In-Law worked with in Morehead City. When they would talk to me I had to ask my F-I-L what they said. Was told that Linguists came to study them from different colleges.
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I went there often in the 70's.

My grandparents retired and moved to Gloucester, a tiny town nearby. That's how I learned about it. Apparently some of the early settlers that were blown off the Outer Banks by storms decided to settle there. Geographical isolation kept their dialect intact.
 
I've been there a couple of times. My impression is that some people who speak English pretend not to in order to avoid answering tourist questions.

I wish I had thought of that when I was working in Boston. :D

Golddollar said:
I always wondered what I must have sounded like when I went to Quebec province in Canada and tried to speak the local language.
Click to expand...
 
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