The Spanish Language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A Linguistic Atlas (review)

This work is destined to be the ultimate resource on topics pertaining to New Mexican Spanish for years to come. Bills and Vigil expertly illustrate dialect geography on 159 color maps, present results of analyses in seventy tables correlating linguistic forms with social variables (e.g., age of language acquisition, proficiency in Spanish), and trace, from its inception to its projected demise, the complex sociohistorical backdrop that informs the linguistic variation of this variety.

The authors' stated intent with this nontraditional linguistic atlas is to "share with all kinds of readers a multitude of facts about New Mexican Spanish: its beauty, its diversity, its history, its present state, its societal conflicts, its prospects for the future" (1). They organize this work into four parts. The first section, "The Study of New Mexican Spanish," begins with a chapter highlighting five language myths (e.g., New Mexican Spanish is the Castilian of sixteenth-century Spain) in order to reveal "the complex interactions of language, society, and culture in this setting" (12). The next chapter outlines methods employed in collecting and coding data for the atlas taken from the New Mexico-Colorado Spanish Survey. This description, coupled with demographic information of the 357 consultants (the "true experts") listed in the appendix, provides ample detail to allow further research and data analysis using this atlas. Part I concludes with a constructive illustration, using one lexical variable, of the methodology employed in subsequent chapters.

The second section, "The Formation of Traditional New Mexican Spanish," outlines an astounding amount of information about individual words and patterns of language use (e.g., dates of borrowings, direction of change), and chapters are filled with lively anecdotes of people, life, and linguistic research challenges. Using primarily lexical variables (and to a lesser degree phonological and grammatical variables), Bills and Vigil outline histories of words traced to Peninsular Spain (Chapter 5) to maritime and Caribbean influences (Chapter 6) and to Mexico, as evidenced in Nahuatlisms (Chapter 7). Their meticulous methodology, clear explanations, abundant citations and examples, as well as their knack for never overstating conclusions drawn from their data leave little doubt as to the precision of their work.

The third section is dedicated to "The Development of Traditional New Mexican Spanish." Two factors, the weakening of communication links with other varieties of Spanish and the "strengthening of contact with speakers of other languages" (151), allowed New Mexican Spanish to develop its distinctive dialect traits. Independent linguistic developments (Chapter 8) are discussed, as well as the contribution of local languages (Chapter 9), English (Chapter 10), and Mexican Spanish (Chapter 11) to the dialect. These chapters deal with a wide variety of linguistic topics, such as the role of different sociocultural factors on language variation, possible linguistic outcomes of language contact, and transborder dialect geography. The diversity of topics treated in this section reflects the authors' method of "delving broadly and deeply" (1) into the subject matter.

The fourth section, "The Present and Future of New Mexican Spanish," begins with apparent time analyses that unambiguously show "intergenerational loss of forms unique to or characteristic of Traditional New Mexican Spanish" (218), motivated by influence from English (through language shift) as well as influence from Mexican and standard Spanish. Evidence of these effects is clearly presented in tables, which significantly correlate linguistic variables with social variables (e.g., generation, age of acquisition of English and Spanish, years of education).

This book concludes with a chapter in which the authors use isogloss bundles to synthesize the book's observations about variation and identify "two distinct dialects and several subdialects within New Mexican Spanish" (316). Further, they convincingly argue that the situation of subtractive bilingualism, coupled with the standardization (and "Mexicanization") of Spanish in the region, may yield "complete abandonment of the ethnic heritage language" (340) and loss of the linguistic features that give New Mexican Spanish its uniqueness.

This atlas is intended...