Talking about Spanish in the United States means talking about the future of the language, in a country called to be the driving force of the Hispanic world in the decades to come. However, in this same country we also find very minority varieties, such as the case of Spanish spoken in the state of New Mexico, which really risks disappearing within one or two generations.
This variety, which can be considered part of the North American linguistic heritage, is surrounded by large linguistic communities, widespread languages and other well-established varieties of Spanish. On the one hand, it borders on American English, a language in common use at all levels both in New Mexico and in the rest of the United States; On the other hand, this is the case of Mexican Spanish, the most widespread and numerous variety of Spanish, which is spoken on both sides of the border and which represents the large original migrant community Mexican found in New Mexico. Finally, he is also in contact with Spanglisha variety of American Spanish resulting from linguistic contact with English implanted in bilingual speakers of Hispanic origin.
In the midst of this linguistic crossroads, New Mexican Spanish combats the power dynamics internal to the language that prioritize and reorganize different speech varieties and communities. The linguistic demography, its historical situation and its peripheral social positioning, the weak linguistic and cultural capital of its speakers, its low vitality or its degree of presence in public life portend a difficult future for this historical dialect established in the south-west of the UNITED STATES. States in the 17th century. In fact, the state capital, Santa Fe, was founded in 1610 by Pedro de Peralta.
It is curious to think that Spanish was spoken in New Mexico at the same time as French in Quebec (the city of Quebec was founded in 1608) or English in Virginia (the town of Jamestown was founded in 1607). However, Spanish in New Mexico did not suffer the same fate as other European languages of colonization in the American context, especially after 1848, when these lands were annexed to the United States, and which marked the penetration progressive of English in public life, until in 1935 Spanish ceased to be used officially by the state government. This history of linguistic substitution has minorityd New Mexico’s native Hispanic community, which, according to the 2020 U.S. Census Bureau, represents about 48% of the population, or about one million residents, of which 9% identify as descendants. of Spanish.
New Mexican Spanish is a border variety both because of its geography (the city of Albuquerque is barely 250 miles from the Mexican border) and because of its linguistic contact with English. This makes it difficult to maintain the language and the visibility of its speakers. This difficulty also lies in the linguistic proximity between New Mexican Spanish and Mexican Spanish itself. We cannot forget that in the beginning New Mexico Spanish was part of the regional dialect spoken in northwest Mexico, typical of the states of Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja California, although since the state of New Mexico became American, their Spanish remained more isolated, managing to preserve archaic expressions and retain very distinctive structures that speak of its conservatism, characteristic of a speech of rural and solitary areas, unrelated to the great currents that unify the world language.
In this sense, according to the studies of Professor Damián Vergara Wilson, from the University of New Mexico, we can still hear the phonetic retention of /h/ in the initial position of the word (to pull to find) or the hehehe caused by the reduction of /s/ in different positions (hey, sir yes sir). At the grammatical level we find adverbs and verbs that are no longer used in standard Spanish (asina, municho, quasi, thing) as well as a certain oscillation in verb endings, particularly in the first person plural (we left because we left, talk to us because we were talking). At the lexical level, the most notable is the logical influence of English and the processes of phonetic and orthographic adaptation of all types of borrowings (bisnesbusiness, crisesChristmas, cuquebiscuit, lonchilunch, trucktrucks, etc.).
This linguistic heritage, today relegated to the family and intimate sphere of New Mexicans, silenced by the use of English and made invisible by the Spanish of migrant communities from northern Mexico, risks disappearing. This is not the only case. In the state of Louisiana, also historically linked to Spanish colonial expansion, there are still small historical communities of Spanish speakers in danger of extinction.
