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New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

nytimes.com

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Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#11

Post by jfengel »

b800h wrote: post #6
sam537 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lowest of the low? Based on consonant pronunciation? How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?

Via a class system. US movies imply you have the same thing over there.

Every language group has a hierarchy of accents, often roughly corresponding to wealth. There is usually a prestige accent used by the wealthy, and which the upper classes mimic. And everyone looks down on rural people, marked by their accent.

It's worse in some places than others but it's practically universal.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#12

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

jghn wrote: post #8
b800h wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Via a class system. US movies imply you have the same thing over there.

Yes. It's not unlike how people assume someone with a rural/southern US accent is dumb.

Accent based class system and discrimination is rampant everywhere: UK, Italy, Romania, Austria, etc.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#14

Post by ChainOfFools »

fcatalan wrote: post #9
sam537 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lowest of the low? Based on consonant pronunciation? How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?

There's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people. I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hea…

I've noticed strong shades of this in various dialects of Caribbean Spanish too; I didn't know there was a name for it much less a possibly correlated colonial origin.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#15

Post by ttfkam »

fcatalan wrote: post #9
sam537 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lowest of the low? Based on consonant pronunciation? How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?

There's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people. I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hea…

I have never heard of Castilian Spanish referred to as "accentless" before.

The lisp always sounds odd to me. That and vosotros. The vast majority of Spanish speakers worldwide use neither.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#17

Post by salomon812 »

This is my family. Sadly, the language dies with my generation. My father speaks this dialect of Spanish... or at least, he used to. We moved to Northern California when I was very little. But, if we had stayed in New Mexico, my cousins don't speak it either. I asked Dad why he didn't teach me. "What would I do? Speak it to myself?" I took Spanish in high school. My father really couldn't help me, some of the basic phrases were different. As more immigrants moved into our area, Dad connected with them and started to learned the more modern Spanish to communicate with them.

I mean, this dialect formed because Northern New Mexico was so isolated. The Manhattan Project changed a lot of that. Suddenly, Los Alamos labs and Sandia labs connected New Mexico with the rest of the world. It wasn't as isolated anymore.

People have told me I could learn it, but I've tried. It's hard when I talk with my family, I'd rather have an adult conversation now rather than basically a preschool level one to learn the language. They say to really learn it, you have to immerse yourself. I lived with my grandmother for several months once while working at Sandia Labs. She insisted on speaking English with me, she was stubborn about it, and I was having a hard enough time understanding her in English.

Let me leave you with a funny story. My uncle had hired a contractor to help with his house. The contractor spoke common Spanish. And he angrily confronted my uncle in Spanish: "You stole my belt!" or at least that's what my uncle heard. "[You stole] mi cinta!" However, in New Mexico "cinta" means belt, but in Mexico it's short for "cinta métrica" or tape measure. (or so I'm told, I don't speak Spanish!) My uncle assured him he did not steal it and went ahead and gave him one of his own.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#19

Post by JoeDaDude »

fzvqq wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Native Spanish speaker here, giving two observations. First, it's not unusual to aspirate the "s" sound in Spanish spoken in the Caribbean countries, particularly if it precedes a consonant, hear several examples in [1]. While this is reserved for informal colloquial speech, it is not an indication of social class. Second, I realize there is a gray divide between what constitutes a dialect and what is just regional accent and slang, but I only hear the latter in the examples given in TFA. I'd expect a lot more differences, bordering on unintelligible, before I call it a dialect. Maybe I'll change my mind if I hear more examples of New Mexico Spanish, but for now, it just sounds like some peculiar word choices and not a completely different dialect,

[1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EXc9UkJtA

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#20

Post by salomon812 »

ttfkam wrote: post #15
fcatalan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people. I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hea…

I have never heard of Castilian Spanish referred to as "accentless" before. The lisp always sounds odd to me. That and vosotros. The vast majority of Spanish speakers worldwide use neither.

Northern New Mexico uses "vosotros." No one told us not to. (Or so I'm told, see my main comment.)
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