[2][page needed][3][4][5][page needed][6] Due to New Mexico's unique political history and over 400 years of relative geographic isolation, New Mexican Spanish is unique within Hispanic America,[1] with the closest similarities found only in certain rural areas of northern Mexico and Texas;[7] it has been described as unlike any form of Spanish in the world.

[1] Among the distinctive features of New Mexican Spanish are the preservation of archaic forms and vocabulary from colonial-era Spanish (such as haiga instead of haya or Yo seigo, instead of Yo soy);[9] the borrowing of words from Puebloan languages,[10] in addition to the Nahuatl loanwords brought by some colonists (such as chimayó, or "obsidian flake", from Tewa and cíbolo, or buffalo, from Zuni);[11] independent lexical and morphological innovations;[12] and a large proportion of English loanwords, particularly for technology (such as bos, troca, and telefón).

[7] Today, the language can be heard in a popular folk genre called New Mexico music and preserved in the traditions of New Mexican cuisine.

The Spanish language first arrived in present-day New Mexico with Juan de Oñate's colonization expedition in 1598, which brought 600-700 settlers.

[20] For example, New Mexican Spanish speakers born before the Pueblo Revolt were generally not yeístas; that is, they pronounced the ⟨ll⟩ and ⟨y⟩ sounds differently.

The presence of such deletion in areas close and historically connected to New Mexico makes it unlikely that New Mexicans independently developed this feature.

Nevertheless, the late-19th-century saw the development of print media, which allowed New Mexican Spanish to resist assimilation toward American English for many decades.

[24] The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, noted, "About one-tenth of the Spanish-American and Indian population [of New Mexico] habitually use the English language.

[26] After 1917, Spanish usage in the public sphere began to decline and it was banned in schools, with students often being punished for speaking the language.

Included in this collection are hundreds of personal interviews and countless examples of corridos and inditas (local ballads), children's games and songs, folktales, chistes (anecdotes), jokes, home remedies, recipes, narratives dealing with local events, proverbs, riddles, songs, versos (rhymed quatrains), and witch stories and accounts of witchcraft.

THE SPANISH SPOKEN in rural areas of New Mexico and southern Colorado can be described as a regional type of language made up of archaic (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) Spanish; Mexican Indian words, mostly from the Náhuatl; a few indigenous Rio Grande Indian words; words and idiomatic expressions peculiar to the Spanish of Mexico (the so-called mexicanismos); local New Mexico and southern Colorado vocabulary; and countless language items from English which the Spanish-speaking segment of the population has borrowed and adapted for everyday use.

New Mexico and southern Colorado Spanish, quite uniform over the whole geographical area, has survived by word of mouth for over four hundred years in a land that until very recent times was almost completely isolated from other Spanish-speaking centers.

... in the 1980s, the dialect is losing its struggle for existence because English is the official language of the area (notwithstanding state constitutional articles or amendments to the contrary–especially in New Mexico).

[34] New Mexican Spanish refers to the Spanish varieties spoken throughout the state of New Mexico and in the southern portion of Colorado; the label is applied to southern Colorado due to it having historically been part of New Mexico until statehood in 1876, and because most Spanish-speaking Coloradoans in the area trace their ancestry to Spanish-speaking New Mexican settlers.

One is what Bills and Vigil call Traditional New Mexican Spanish (abbreviated TNMS),[36][37] spoken in the northern and central parts of the region, whose speakers generally represent early colonial settlement.

[38][39] Despite TNMS' distinctiveness, it does fit into a Mexican "macro-dialect" due to its historical origins and features, and has been called "an offshoot of the Spanish of northern Mexico".

For example, syllable-initial /s/-aspiration, while occurring throughout New Mexico and Southern Colorado, is particularly notable along the upper Rio Grande between Albuquerque and Taos.

One sub-dialect of Border Spanish, identified by Bills and Vigil based on lexical criteria, can be found in the southwestern corner of the state, including Doña Ana County and the areas to its west.

[56] Use of such forms is not universal, usually correlates negatively with education,[57] and the most characteristic traits of Traditional New Mexican Spanish are generally more common among older speakers.

[17] These include: Also, although not part of verbal morphology, Traditional New Mexican Spanish often turns the clitic nos into los.

For example, llamar para atrás for 'to call back' and other such seemingly-calqued expressions with pa(ra a)trás are widespread.

However, it is worth noting that even in monolingual Spanish varieties, such as that of Mexico City, speakers do not always use the subjunctive mood in such supposedly obligatory situations.

One notable feature of hiatus resolution in northern New Mexico is the tendency to delete the initial /e/ of words beginning in /es/ before a consonant, such as estar, escribir, español.

[113] The standard form, and murciégalo, are mainly found in the Border Spanish area, in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and along the Arkansas River in Colorado.

[114] Several definite examples of metathesis have occurred in New Mexican Spanish: estógamo from estómago 'stomach', idomia from idioma 'language', pader from pared 'wall', probe from pobre 'poor' and redetir from derretir 'to melt'.

[115] New Mexican Spanish, including both the Traditional and the Border varieties, has also regularized the gender of some nouns, such as idioma 'language' and sistema "system".

[116] Residents of Martineztown, Albuquerque in the early 80s viewed the feminine form, la sistema, as slightly more correct than the traditional masculine.

[119] The word telefón, a loanword for 'telephone', is also used across New Mexico and southern Colorado, with little geographical patterning, being found as far south as Las Cruces.

For example, the Navajo terms for "money" (béeso) and "Anglo" (bilagáana) are borrowings from Spanish peso and americano respectively.

Most Puebloan loanwords in New Mexican Spanish have to do with people and place names, cultural artifacts, foods, and plants and herbs.