El Español de Nuevo México y Colorado Contemporáneos

The collection consists of 26 Spanish language interviews conducted in 2022 by Dr. Mario Del Ángel-Guevara for his dissertation in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of New Mexico. The goal of Dr. Del Angel-Guevara’s corpus of the Spanish language spoken in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado is to create an updated corpus of Spanish speech samples in the XXI century obtained from interviews of diverse Hispanic populations throughout northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Native born Hispanic New Mexicans and Mexico-born immigrants with a long residence in the region were included in this project.

The ENMCCO corpus continues Dr. Garland Bills's and Dr. Neddy Vigil's pioneering research on Spanish in New Mexico and the trend to build corpora of spoken Spanish in the region. The ENMCCO consists of 26 interviews totaling over 20 hours of recording from 26 native Spanish speakers living in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and comprising 14 communities among the speakers interviewed. Audio files, participant demographic and linguistic background information, research tasks and promotional flyers are available in this collection. Dr. Del Angel-Guevara’s dissertation based on these interviews is also available in the Digital Repository.

This project uses language samples from community-based data and researches dialectal variation in the Spanish lexicon used in the region, specifically for 67 concepts. The El Español del Nuevo México y Colorado Contemporáneos (ENMCCO) corpus records Spanish language speech through sociolinguistic interviews and through participation in three research tasks. Variation within the Spanish forms in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado serves to demonstrate the changing and growing dialectal diversity in places where Spanish speakers interact not only in the home but also with other community members from Mexico and/or New Mexico/Colorado. Although these interviews were recorded with specific objectives in mind, comparing the Spanish lexicon, there still remains a wealth of material in this corpus that has yet to be explored and which can be useful for research in other areas of scholarship.

Dr. Del Angel-Guevara thanks the UNM’s Center for Regional Studies (CRS), the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute (SHRI), the UNM Office of Graduate Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Latinx Linguist Fund for providing research funds to build this body of Spanish language samples.