New Mexican Spanish

New Mexican Spanish (Spanish: español neomexicano, or ladino as it is known in Mexico) is a variant or dialect of Spanish spoken in the United States, primarily in the northern part of the state of New Mexico and the southern part of the state of Colorado. Despite a continual influence from the Spanish spoken in Mexico to the south by contact with Mexican migrants who fled to U.S. from Mexican Revolution, New Mexico's relative geographical isolation and political isolation from the time New Mexico was purchased by United States from Mexico and unique political history has made New Mexican Spanish differ notably from Spanish spoken in other parts of Latin America, including northern Mexico and Texas, but it was one of the dialects of Mexican Spanish.

Speakers of New Mexican Spanish are mainly descendants of Spanish colonists who arrived in New Mexico in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. During this time, contact with the rest of Spanish America was limited, and New Mexican Spanish was allowed to develop on its own course. In the meantime, Spanish colonists coexisted with Puebloan peoples and Navajos. After the Mexican-American War, New Mexico and all its inhabitants came under the governance of the English-speaking United States, and for the next hundred years, English-speakers increased in number.

For these reasons, the main differences between New Mexican Spanish and other forms of Latin American Spanish are these: the preservation of forms and vocabulary from colonial-era Spanish (e.g., in some places haiga instead of haya or Yo seigo instead of Yo soy); the borrowing of words from Rio Grande Indian languages for indigenous vocabulary (in addition to the Nahuatl additions that the colonists had brought); a tendency to "re-coin" Spanish words that had fallen into disuse (for example, ojo, whose literal meaning is "eye," was repurposed to mean "hot spring" as well); and a large proportion of English loan words, particularly for technological words (e.g. bós, troqua, and telefón). Pronunciation also carries influences from colonial, Native American, and English sources. In recent years, speakers developed a modern New Mexican Spanish, called Renovador, which contains more modern vocabulary because of the increasing popularity of Spanish-language broadcast media in the U.S. and intermarriage of Mexican settlers and descendants of colonial Spanish settlers, the modernized dialect even contains Mexican Spanish slangs (mexicanismos).

Read more about New Mexican Spanish:  History, Morphological Variation, Phonetic Variation, Language Contact, Legal Status

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