New Mexico Speaks Weird Spanish and They’re Going to Stop
Spanish is spoken in places all over the world but, after 400 years, that may change in Northern New Mexico.
You can go almost anywhere and find someone who speaks Spanish. If you speak Spanish, you can hold your own pretty well, conversationally, in Italy, France and Spain.
Yes, there are, (subtle), differences between "Spanish" Spanish and Mexican Spanish. There's also a difference between those types of Spanish and the "Border Spanish" we speak around here. (We use more "slang" around here.)
There is one type of Spanish though that is very rare and pretty much only used in one place on Earth ... Questa, N.M.
For more than 400 years, these mountains have cradled a form of Spanish that today exists nowhere else on earth. Even after the absorption of their lands into the United States in the 19th century, generations of speakers somehow kept the dialect alive, through poetry and song and the everyday exchanges on the streets of Hispanic enclaves scattered throughout the region. - NYTimes
The version of Spanish spoken by an ever dwindling number of people in Questa is different mostly due to strange verb conjugations, different pronunciations and a combination of words drawn from English and the languages of Native Americans.
Basically, a new wave of Spanish speakers is taking over with the more modern version of the language ... igf they learn Spanish at all.
As the elderly in Questa pass on, area youths are not learning the "New Mexican Spanish" and it is quickly becoming a lost language.
If you're into linguistics or just want to learn something that very few other people know, you better move fast.
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