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 coming decades. However, in that same country we also find very minorized varieties, such as the case of Spanish spoken in the state of New Mexico, which is at real risk of becoming extinct within one or two generations.
This variety, which can be considered part of the North American linguistic heritage, is surrounded by large speech 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, it does so with Mexican Spanish, the most widespread and numerous variety of Spanish, which is spoken on both sides of the border and represents the large migrant community of Mexican descent that we find in New Mexico. Lastly, he is also in contact with the Spanglisha variety of American Spanish resulting from linguistic contact with English implanted in bilingual speakers of Hispanic heritage.
In the midst of this linguistic crossroads, New Mexican Spanish combats the power dynamics internal to the language that hierarchize and reorder the different speech varieties and communities. The linguistic demographics, its historical situation and peripheral social positioning, the scarce linguistic and cultural capital of its speakers, its low vitality or the degree of presence in public life predict a difficult future for this historical dialect that was established in the southwest of the United 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 has been spoken in New Mexico for the same time as French in Quebec (Quebec City was founded in 1608) or English in Virginia (Jamestown was founded in 1607). However, Spanish in New Mexico did not suffer the same fate as the other European languages of colonization in the American context, especially after 1848, the date on which these lands were annexed to the United States, and which marked the gradual penetration of English in public life, until in 1935 Spanish stopped being used officially by the state government. This history of linguistic substitution minorized the Hispanic community originally from New Mexico, which, according to the 2020 US Census Bureau, is around 48% of the population, approximately one million inhabitants, 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 400 kilometers from the Mexican border) and because of its linguistic contact with English. This makes maintaining the language and the visibility of its speakers a difficult task. This difficulty also lies in the linguistic proximity between New Mexican Spanish and Mexican Spanish itself. We cannot forget that, in the beginning, New Mexican Spanish was part of the regional dialect spoken in the northwest of 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 retaining very distinctive structures that speak of its conservatism, characteristic of speech from rural and solitary areas, not connected with the great trends that unify the global language.
In that 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 word-initial position there (pull to be found) or the hehehe caused by the reduction of /s/ in different positions (hey, sir yes, sir). At a grammatical level we find some adverbs and verbs that are out of use in standard Spanish (asina, muncho, quasi, truje) as well as a certain oscillation in verbal endings, especially in the first person plural (we have gone for we have gone, talk to us because we were talking). At the lexical level, the most notable thing is the logical influence of English and the processes of phonetic and orthographic adaptation of all types of loanwords (bisnesbusiness, crismesChristmas, cuquecookie, lonchilunch, trucktrucks, etc.).
This linguistic heritage, relegated today to the family and intimate sphere of New Mexicans, silenced by the use of English and made invisible by the Spanish of the migrant communities from northern Mexico, runs the risk of 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.
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