This paper analyzes the genesis of New Mexican Spanish during the colonial period (17th and 18th centuries) as the consequence of ‘new dialect formation via koinéization’ (Trudgill 1986, 2004, Kerswill & Williams 2000, Kerswill & Trudgill 2005). It focuses primarily on the evidence foryeísmo, i.e. the merger of the medieval palatal lateral and palatal fricative phonemes, in a corpus of documents written in the century following the resettlement of New Mexico by Spanish speakers in 1693. The analysis shows that the resettlement involved contact between two groups of speakers exhibiting widely divergent levels of prevalence of the merger, causing the loss of the phonemic contrast in the community in as little as one generation. This contradicts several previous assumptions about the chronology of Latin Americanyeísmoand about the role of koinéization in the origins of New World Spanish.ResumeCette etude analyse la genese de l’espagnol du Nouveau-Mexique pendant la periode coloniale (17e et 18e siecles) en tant que consequence d’un processus de ‘formation d’un nouveau dialecte par nivellement dialectal’ (Trudgill 1986, 2004, Kerswill et Williams 2000, Kerswill et Trudgill 2005). L’etude se concentre principalement sur leyeismo, phenomene de fusion de deux phonemes distincts en espagnol medieval (une consonne laterale palatale et une fricative palatale), et ce dans un corpus de documents ecrits un siecle apres le retour des espagnols dans cette region en 1693. L’analyse montre que ce retour des espagnols a provoque le contact entre deux groupes de locuteurs qui presentaient chacun des differences nettes pour ce qui est de la confusion des deux phonemes, aboutissant a leur fusion, dans cette communaute, en a peine une generation. On soutient aussi que ces donnees contredisent plusieurs des hypotheses anterieures sur la chronologie duyeismoamericain et sur le role qu’a joue le nivellement dialectal dans la diachronie de l’espagnol du Nouveau Monde.ZusammenfassungIn diesem Beitrag wird die Entstehung des Spanischen in New Mexico wahrend der Kolonialzeit (17. und 18. Jahrhundert) als Folge eines Prozesses ‘neuer Dialekt-Bildung durch Koineisierung’ (Trudgill 1986, 2004, Kerswill und Williams 2000, Kerswill und Trudgill 2005) analysiert. Der Augenmerk liegt hauptsachlich auf den Beweisen furyeismo, d.h. der Fusion zwischen zwei mittelalterlichen Palatalen, lateral und frikativ, in einem Korpus von Dokumenten, die im Jahrhundert nach der spanischen Umsiedlung Neumexikos 1693 geschrieben wurden. Die Analyse zeigt, dass durch die Umsiedlung zwei Gruppen von Sprechern, die enorm unterschiedliche Auspragungen dieser Fusion aufwiesen, in Kontakt gekommen sind. Dies fuhrte in dieser Gemeinschaft zu dem Verlust des phonemischen Kontrasts in weniger als einer Generation. Es wird auch argumentiert, dass diese Beweise einige fruhere Annahmen uber die Chronologie des lateinamerikanischenyeismound uber die Rolle der Koineisierung in den Ursprungen der spanischen Sprache in der Neuen Welt widerspricht.

This paper proposes a reconstruction of the demographic and linguistic composition of the Spanish settling contingent in the American colonies as one of several key factors determining the evolution of Spanish in the early colonial period (sixteenth century). It focuses on the evidence for contact among several sibilant systems, including seseo, i.e. the reduction of four medieval sibilants to /s/. In the standard narrative of the history of Latin American Spanish, this reduction is seen as the consequence of the demographic primacy of seseo in the early metropolitan colonial mix and the inherent phonological simplicity of the merger (Catalán 1958; Granda 1994; Parodi 1995; Hidalgo 2016). This study calls for a reassessment of several of these previous assumptions. The bulk of the data in this study come from a corpus of private letters by early colonial settlers from Spain, analysed quantitatively and contextualized on the basis of additional demographic and linguistic evidence. The sociolinguistic reconstruction that emerges from this data contradicts the canonical presentation of the internal and external ecology of early colonial Latin American Spanish, and calls for the incorporation of a variety of cognitive and sociodemographic triggers beyond the action of the metropolitan input.

Grammatical restructuring in contact situations is customarily analyzed under the lens of either language contact or dialect contact. In this study we argue that both processes may operate jointly in social settings where dialectal accommodation and adult L2 learning favor the same linguistic outcomes. From an evolutionary perspective, this overlap between both forms of contact may be conceptualized as a function of a common underlying process, with speakers selecting features of heterogeneous provenance, acquired at various life stages. We exemplify this joint effect by focusing on two changes in the history of Spanish: the rearrangement of the 3rd person object clitic system in medieval southern Iberian Castilian and the merging of the medieval sibilants in early colonial Spanish.

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This study analyzes the patterns of incorporation of English elements in New Mexican Spanish in the decades following the annexation of New Mexico by the United States as reflected in a corpus of private letters written between 1848 and 1936. The quantitative analysis shows that most types of contact features are infrequent during much of this period, but there is an increase in the presence of English elements in the last decades covered by the corpus. It also shows that semantic and lexical borrowing is much more frequent than structural interference or code-switching. These findings are then correlated with the general sociolinguistic environment of post-annexation Hispanic New Mexico, where bilingualism and language shift to English were much more infrequent than elsewhere in the US Southwest. Attention is also paid to features that pertain exclusively to the written language, and their distribution is explained as a function of the degree of exposure of Hispanic New Mexicans to literacy in English and Spanish.