A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish [SOLD]

A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish 

by Rubén Cobos

Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe

Softcover, first edition 1983, 189 pages, good condition.

The lexical items contained in this work come from towns and villages of the upper Rio Grande in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.  A dialect of Spanish has been spoken uninterruptedly since the end of the seventeenth century in New Mexico, and since the middle of the nineteenth century in southern Colorado.

I have been in direct contact with the Spanish spoken in these areas since coming from Mexico into New Mexico some 50 years ago. It was as a student at Menaul, a Presbyterian school for Spanish-American boys in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that I first became acquainted with New Mexico Spanish as spoken by my classmates. Those young men came to Menaul from homes in Santa Fe, Chimayó, Española, El Rito, Peñasco, Taos, Mora, Chama, and other towns in New Mexico, and from Antonito, Conejos, La Jara, Alamosa, Fort Garland, San Luis, Walsenburg, Trinidad, La Junta, and other towns in Colorado.

I have excluded common household words in daily use. I have included words which have local as acceptations superimposed on their original meanings, a shift of accent, or definite semantic variations not present in their standard Spanish counterparts.

The spelling of the entries in this work is based on current rules of Spanish orthography and accentuation.  Alphabetization, likewise, follows standard Spanish practices.  The letters ch, ll and ñ occur after c, l and n respectively, and have separate, individual sections in the dictionary.

Pronunciation of local Spanish is akin to that of northern Mexico, and both differ from Castilian Spanish pronunciation with respect to c, z, ll, and y.

From the Introduction:

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 Nahuatl; 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 three hundred and eighty years in a land that until very recent times was almost completely isolated from other Spanish-speaking centers.

Basically Spanish in its morphology and syntax, New Mexico and southern Colorado Spanish is an offshoot of the Spanish of northern Mexico, especially with respect to usage and pronunciation. This is understandable, since New Mexico was an integral part of New Spain (Mexico) from 1540 to 1821 and a part of Mexico from that year until 1850, when it became a territory of the United States.