Due to its historical origins, it has a mostly conservative phonology with a vocabulary derived from rural Mexican Spanish.

The Spanish language was preserved in the Sabine River communities until the 20th century due to isolation and, in Texas at least, ethnic solidarity.

[3] The establishment of public schooling exerted strong linguistic pressure on these communities to learn and exclusively speak English, and the arrival of modern infrastructure such as electricity, paved roads, telephones, and the Kansas City Southern Railway through Zwolle reduced their isolation.

[4][5] This stopped the intergenerational transmission of Spanish, with most Spanish-speaking residents choosing not to teach their children the language.

[1] Stark (1980) estimated the presence of just ten people who still speak Spanish fluently in the Zwolle-Ebarb area, who were mainly in their seventies and eighties.

Louisiana residents have diverse appearances, some being very pale and others vary dark-complexioned,[7][8] and have experienced a re-surfacing of American Indian identity.

[8] The Louisiana residents have been called "Meskin", "Chonche", and "Red Bones" by their Anglo-American neighbors.

[1] In Moral there is no identification with Native American culture, despite the open acknowledgement of many trigueño, or 'dark-complexioned' residents.

[14] Gregory (1996) mentions a greater number of French loanwords in the speech of the communities closer to Natchitoches.

[19] One speaker, again the oldest and most fluent in Spanish from Pratt (2000)'s survey, pronounced trajeron 'they brought' as [tɾuˈʃweɾon].

[27] In informal speech, /r/ can be elided before a denti-alveolar stop /t/ or /d/, or before a pause, thus: cardenal [kaðeˈnal] 'cardinal (bird)', carta [ˈkarta] 'letter', salir [saˈli] 'to leave'.

The labiodental fricative allophone [v], according to Pratt (2000), typically corresponds to a written, etymological ⟨v⟩, but it can be realized when pronouncing other words as well.

[37] /g/ is realized as a voiced velar stop after a pause and in any consonant cluster, for example in Goyo [ˈɡoʝo] 'Gregorio', algodón [algoˈðon] 'cotton', negrito [neˈgrito] 'black haw tree'.

[39] The approximant /ʝ/, spelled ⟨y⟩ or ⟨ll⟩ is frequently elided in contact with /i/ and after /e/, for example gallina 'hen' becomes [gaˈina], silla 'chair' becomes [ˈsi.a] and sello 'stamp' becomes [ˈse.o].

[10][40] One speaker, the oldest and most fluent in Spanish in Pratt (2000)'s survey, often adds an epenthetic [ʝ] between sequences of /i/ and /o/ or /i/ and /a/, as in tío [ˈti.ʝo] 'uncle'.

[15] One speaker dropped [j] in the diphthong /ie/ after another consonant while speaking informally, saying [ˈrendas] for riendas 'reins' and [ˈtera] for tierra 'land'.

[41] There is a tendency to simplify clusters and to drop consonants before voiceless stops in some words, as in doctor 'doctor', molcajete 'molcajete, and fuiste 'you went/were', pronounced dotor, mocajete, and fuite respectively.

[44] Sometimes the entire first syllable of such words can be dropped, as in tar or cuela for estar, escuela 'to be, school'.

[45] Stark (1980) reports that the word-initial nasal is dropped in words starting with /njV/, so nieto 'grandchild' is realized [ˈjeto], although this was not found in Pratt (2000).

[46] The grammar of Sabine River Spanish reflects its origins in nonstandard, rural Mexican speech, as well as influence from English and morphological reduction due to language death.

[47] As a result of language death and its speakers' greater fluency in English, gender and number agreement are greatly weakened.

[48] Many Mexicanisms, including a large number of Nahuatl loanwords, and generally archaic or rustic words are used in Sabine River Spanish.

[9] Despite an extensive history of contact, Sabine River Spanish almost no loans from native American languages besides Nahuatl.

[53] All words for "Indian" in this variety are at least partially derogatory, for example meco or chichimeco from "Chichimeca", the Nahuatl term for the "wild" tribes on Mexico's northern frontier.

The rate of switching between languages in a single sentence was very high, and often violated the typical syntactic restrictions on Spanish/English code-switching.

The speech of Adaeseños was, to Lipski, "impressionistically unlike anything I have ever heard from fluent Spanish-English bilinguals in any community."

Code-switching could occur between subject pronouns and predicates, as in "they hervía las ollas" ("they would boil the pots"), and between negative words and the main verb, as in "si el papá y la mamá no agreed" ("if the father and the mother didn't agree"), or between fronted interrogative words and the rest of the sentence, as in "Nobody knows which way jueron" ("nobody knows which way they went"), to give some examples of code-switches that violate the normal syntactic restraints.