Aurora Martínez Kane

Linguistic, Social, and Attitudinal Aspects in the Development of New Mexican Spanish Paragoge

This project examines both use of and attitudes toward Traditional New Mexican Spanish, the oldest US Spanish dialect spoken today, focusing mainly on the dialect’s little-studied use of an epenthetic vowel (i.e. mal ‘bad’ -> male or mali). Using a mixed methods approach, the project investigates the use of this distinctive TNMS feature in Spanish-language materials ranging from the 16th century to the 20th century; it also uses a perceptual survey to examine attitudes in the contemporary New Mexican Hispanic community toward the use of this feature and TNMS as a whole. Taken together, these investigations aim to shed light on the development of this unique dialect.