West Chester Professor One of Few Researchers to Have Studied This Rare Spanish Dialect

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New Mexico Spanish, a unique American dialect, has been surviving mostly through prayers, writes Giovanna Dell’Orto for PA Homepage

“Unlike most other forms of Spanish used in the U.S. today, it’s not due to immigration in the last 100 years, but rooted back to the 1500s,” said Israel Sanz-Sánchez, a professor of languages at West Chester University

Sanz-Sánchez is among the limited group of people who have researched the dialect. 

Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived to the valleys isolated between mountains, deserts, and plains at the end of the 1500s. After they were pushed back south by the Pueblo Native Americans, they resettled the area a century later. Over time, their language evolved to incorporate both words carried from medieval Spain and a mixture of expressions that came from Mexican Spanish and Native forms as well as some English after the territory became part of the United States. 

The villages, removed from the center of political and economic power for hundreds of years, preserved the dialect orally. 

It was only in the mid-20th century that the push to promote schooling in English caused the dialect to begin slowly fading away. 

Read more about the dialect in PA Homepage

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