The Archaic and the Modern in the Spanish of New Mexico

Abstract

In the field of dialectology, New Mexican Spanish has for some years attracted the attention of scholars and linguists.* Representing to a large extent the language of the sixteenth-century conquistadores, it has developed under peculiar conditions, isolated from both Spain and Mexico, on one hand, and since 1846 subject to strong North American influence, on the other. The feature which has especially interested philologists is the strongly archaic tendency of the language, and the high percentage, in popular speech, of archaisms such as truje, vide, mesmo, muncho, cuasi, and anque. The characteristics of New Mexico Spanish have been described, in considerable detail, by competent scholars. The key work on the subject is the twovolume study by Professor Aurelio M. Espinosa, translated and reelaborated by Amado Alonso and Angel Rosenblat, entitled Estudios sobre el espaniol de Nuevo Mkjico.1 In this monumental work Dr. Espinosa defines the New Mexican speech area as including all of New Mexico, the valley of San Luis in Colorado, and a small strip of eastern Arizona. In his prefacio, however, he specifically states that the study is limited to Colorado's San Luis Valley and to all of New Mexico north of the city of Socorro, with Sante Fe as center. This means that a part of the New Mexico speech area, namely the two hundred miles south of Socorro and including such cities as Hot Springs, Silver City, Deming, Carlsbad, Lordsburg, and Las Cruces, has not been investigated. Espinosa himself, in a personal letter dated May 22, 1950, recommends that research be done on Southern New Mexican Spanish, especially on the vowels, for the purpose of comparing them with their counterparts in the North, described by him, as well as with the closed and open vowels described by Navarro Tomas. The region south of Socorro, New Mexico, therefore, offers possibilities of various types of research, phonetic and otherwise.2 The present paper will touch upon various aspects of the speech in this area and will also make certain observations on present-day New Mexican Spanish in general. Structurally the language spoken in the South follows quite closely the main features of all New Mexican Spanish. The conjugations are virtually reduced to two: ar and er verbs. The second person familiar preterite commonly ends in ates and ites: ti hablates, ti vendites (the forms hablastes and vendistes are also heard). Practically all words ending in a (except for a few like dia) are treated as feminine: la idioma, la tranvia, la planeta. The present subjunctive is accented throughout on the first syllable, and peculiarly ends in nos rather than mos in the first person singular. Thus hablar is conjugated as follows: hable, hables, hable, hdblenos, hablen. In the imperfect subjunctive, as well, nos is employed, so that the first person plural would be habldranos and not habldramos.