Talk:English in New Mexico

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Savidinaz, Jordansanchez1. Peer reviewers: Johnson gracee.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation demurer[edit]

The section on pronunciation differences is hilarious.... as if people are actually pronouncing "remember" as "member." So dumb. I don't think anyone pronounces "remember" that way, some of us just use "member" instead. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.127.1.11 (talk) 20:30, 8 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's a shortening, like saying "'cause" instead of "because".  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  04:11, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion rationale completely ignores key sources[edit]

The Library of Congress has multiple recordings of Pueblo men and women including Zuni. The results of that survey indicate that New Mexican English is unique, and not solely "Spanish"-influenced. Encyclopedia.com is an encyclopedia search engine that uses credible encyclopedias, this particular piece is from the Worldmark Encyclopedia of the States. The viral videos are relevant, in the same way that stereotypical Southern Accented comedy is, it exaggerates features within the phonological differences, and Lauren Poole doesn't sound like a Spanish name. Though while we're on the Spanish-influence subject, there's a new study indicating that the VOT-values of New Mexican English are not indicative of bilingualism, but rather from influences: https://www.academia.edu/4975518/Spanish-English_bilingual_VOT_in_spontaneous_code-switching 75.173.98.22 (talk) 10:31, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@75.173.98.22: I didn't "gimp" the article. I demonstrated how much of it is unreferenced, or completely irrelevantly referenced, whittling it down to the actually sensibly referenced material (being doubtful about the topic since, as I cautioned, the bulk of the material seems to come primarily from two comedy videos, and that's it). Now you've restored a bunch of information that is completely unverified. I was in the process of making massive edits and then just realized, exploring each source individually, that they largely helped nothing. I went online to improve the article (as you recommend) and quickly discovered that "New Mexican English" is neither notable nor an obviously verifiable concept, particularly in the academic literature.
What about Lauren Poole not having a Spanish name? She's an actress/comedian doing an exaggerated accent; if you hear her naturally speak, she uses a different accent. I thought what was relevant on WP was credible sources. At least Southern accented comedy is massively notable; New Mexican English comedy is certainly not. You say that my rationale "completely ignores key sources," but where exactly are any of the key sources on this accent? I do appreciate your explaining about Encyclopedia.com; in any case, here is all the relevant information from that particular source:

Numerous Spanish borrowings [in New Mexico] include vigas (rafters) in the northern half, and canales (gutters) and acequia (irrigation ditch) in the Rio Grande Valley. New Mexico English is a mixture of dominant Midland, with some Northern features (such as sick to the stomach) in the northeast, and Southern and South Midland features such as spoonbread and carry (escort) in the eastern agricultural fringe.

So that's a total of seven unique phrases/words and one strong if brief source; is that enough to define a New Mexican dialect of English and support its having its own WP page? You mention also the Library of Congress recordings, which are great resources, but they do not analyze or delineate any phonological or lexical features. You talk about the survey and what its results "indicate"; is there a particular website that describes that? It seems to me that this would be a stronger source than what is referenced so far. Anyway, I'd be happy to trim back down some of this page rather than propose its deletion, though how should I know what to keep and what not to based on the lack of relevant sources? When I trimmed it down the first time, you see the little information that was left... and I actively looked for credible sources online. I think the next step is to put this through the standard deletion review process, to hear other opinions as well. Wolfdog (talk) 22:06, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This must have been covered in other sources. It's as much a regional dialect as any other. Keep looking. It's probably even been covered in some linguistics journal articles.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  02:12, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Overhaul[edit]

While the deletion discussion continues, with no obvious consensus, I'm going to start overhauling the page, probably including a lot of deletion of unreferenced (or irrelevantly referenced) material. In the process, I'll explain below the changes I make and exact reasons for the edits/deletions. If other users worry this will unfairly influence the deletion discussion or have other concerns, please let me know your thoughts ASAP. Thanks. Wolfdog (talk) 19:58, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Removing these sources:

  • "Montano bridge..." and " "New Mexico True Recipes: Joseph's New Mexican Green Chile Relleno": These tells nothing about the dialect; they merely bolster singular individuals' pronunciations of single words; they do not in any way verify statements about general spelling rules used for pronunciation in New Mexican English, such as that "Sometimes the "ñ" is replaced with simply an "n" in writing, but the pronunciation contextually remains "ñ" in speech". Deleting the "referenced" material as well.
  • Burkett, E.M. (1978). "American English Dialects in Literature": Page 107 does NOT verify the idea that this is a subset of a (just as nebulous) Southwestern American English. Deleting both the source and the statement.
  • Busby, M. (2004). The Southwest: Keeping the source, which is credible; however, it says nothing about "El Paso, Texas" and does not confirm where New Mexican English is spoken or even if such a dialect exists. Deleting all related material. It does, however, describe a potential, young dialect-in-formation in the Southwest, so I've changed the lede to reflect that.

Removing this unsourced material:

  • Deleted entire unsourced second paragraph of the article.
  • The Encyclopedia.com article NEVER mentions anything about a "singsongy" intonation pattern. Deleting the sentence that says so.
  • The whole "Chile" pronunciation example is plain bizarre. For some reason, the reference used here is one man's YouTube video of him in the kitchen with "chili" peppers.
  • Nothing in the "phonetic variation" chart is referenced; I've deleted the whole thing.
  • Miscellaneous unreferenced material.

Adding in or expanding on this material:

  • "The Burqueno Dialect" (interview with Prof. Damian Wilson): this video actually seems to pin down some of the unique sounds and terms of the Albuquerque dialect, and the speaker seems to be a credible linguistics professor. I've used this source in a revised second paragraph for the article.

To be continued... Wolfdog (talk) 20:51, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

By our powers combined we will fix this article! The history doesn't need citations, as this can easily be looked up, specifically at the sources on History of New Mexico and others. I will be adding some citations for the history, but it will quickly become evident why this might be a bad idea. 75.173.98.22 (talk) 04:47, 27 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I absolutely appreciate your cooperative goodwill, however, I don't understand the edits you have just made, putting back several unreferenced sources, including sources that give one-off pronunciations (which prove nothing unless a language scholar, credible reporter, cultural expert, etc. describes them, or an entire community can be verified to use them), or the kind of speaking-in-riddles of your statement "it will quickly become evident why this might be a bad idea." Please just be straightforward about why. I'm reverting back all of your edits. I'm also removing the Heaven Sent Gaming source; see the deletion discussion. Here are just some examples of why I'm reverting: you're putting back a citation for El Paso regionality and Navajo influences that doesn't even mention the names "El Paso" or "Navajo"; your two sources for the pronunciation of "rio" [ˈɾi.o] and "grande" [ˈɡɾãn.de̞] (1) are pronunciations of single speakers who could have lived in New York City for 30 years, for all we know, and (2) don't even corroborate those pronunciations--since the speakers repeatedly say [ˈɡɹɑn.deɪ], not [ˈɡɾãn.de̞]; the UWM Dialect Survey shows almost nothing interesting about New Mexico, and even show that "crayon" is overwhelming pronounced like "CRAY-awn," not "CRAN," in that region (perhaps showing either that the "dialect" described on this WP page is more of a stereotype than a reality, OR that it's more specific than "New Mexico" -- maybe Albuquerque?); and you're reinstating information that is inaccurate, e.g. "chili" is absolutely NOT pronounced [ˈʧi.i] (which would sound like "CHEE-ee") in any standard English. Wolfdog (talk) 19:31, 27 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

These are not one-off pronunciations, they are pronunciation by statewide broadcasts by multiple news personalities employed by nationally recognized local news brands, aka they are credible reporters. You should not, in a Wikipedia article, overload a history section with citations, as citing every single fact of a history requires multiple individual sources which is why the Texan English article does not cite these types of sources, it becomes distracting. I agree with removing the Heaven Sent Gaming source, until its veracity can be attested for, but as far as I can tell it looks informative and factual. The El Paso regions' New Mexican English is well-known, and even mentioned on the Texan English article. And, of course, Navajo has an effect on New Mexican English, its the third most spoken language in the state. Those are park rangers, employed by the US Park Services department, their jobs are to convey accurate information, including pronunciation; calling the news personalities, PEW resource, and park rangers untrustworthy is a bit of a strech. I agree with the cran thing, I can't find a source for it, though I've heard it my entire life, and I've lived throughout this state my entire life. Chile is pronounced, in standard English, in pronunciation is /ˈtʃɪl i/ and in New Mexican english as [ˈʧi.le], you could have fixed the IPA, instead of removing an entire statement for it. In New Mexico, our chile is spelled with an 'e' not an 'i' and is in the congressional record as such. Your statement "presumably still in the process of formation" could be seen as subversive and belittling, and is a completely unfounded statement, English has been evolving in New Mexico since the mid-1800s which is the same length of time as Californian English. 75.173.98.22 (talk) 04:25, 28 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • I'm saying the "example references" you provided as citations show single individuals pronouncing words in natural speech (which is sometimes valuable, though in this instance seems like original research), rather than experts discussing pronunciations. How do we know these individuals are speaking with a New Mexican English accent? We have hardly even defined the dialect yet.
  • OK, thank you for explaining the history issue, though I feel like an abundance of (or even very small number of sources) is certainly better than none.
  • The El Paso region's New Mexican English is well known according to what source? Solid sources are what we skeptics are continually asking for.
  • I realize Navajo is influential in the area, but the source you reinstated on the page you gave did not say anything about Navajo and its relationship to New Mexican English.
  • I removed the entire "chili" statement because of the same issue as the "example references" issue; I was just showing that the chart was already a mess with the IPA, but even before we clean up the IPA, we need credible sources giving the pronunciations, not videos that have nothing to do with linguistics.
  • I'm not at all intending to be "subversive and belittling." The Busby citation reads that "English in the Southwest is less than 150 years old... 'If American English as a whole is a youth compared to the European national languages, western American speech is a mere infant. And like an infant, its personality and features are not yet well formed.' Presumably, the same could be said of American English in the Southwest." The source is clearly saying that even the broader western dialect is still in formation, and thus "presumably," so is the subset Southwestern English (again, no New Mexican dialect is specified). I was actually adding in the comment of "dialect-in-formation" to try to lend credibility to the idea of New Mexican English, thinking that maybe the reason it's so difficult to find linguistics articles on it is because the variety is not yet fully formed and so not yet fully studied. In any case, the Busby event certainly suggests that a Southwest dialect of U.S. English may not yet be fully formed.

Wolfdog (talk) 20:57, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, intriguing, I completely see what your saying now. I think we're both finally on the same page. I can understand your concern with "original research", but you can find hundreds of examples New Mexicans pronouncing those words as such, I don't think they are too far of a stretch since the news reporters and park rangers must pronounce proper nouns in a manner to explain to their general public. I found a few interesting resources regarding the history of Arizona and New Mexico's linguistic differences. Arizonan English from what I can gather might be mostly similar to Californian English. http://books.google.com/books?id=wLoJ31HXl40C&pg=PA59 http://books.google.com/books?id=2wZjw4DZ_VAC&pg=PA20 These sources imply that the English language would've developed uniquely, but Arizona's law is surprisingly similar to California's law. I get what your saying about it "presumably" still forming, but I don't think mentioning since the same could be said for Texan and Californian English. I'll do more research and edits once the deletion discussion ends, until then I don't feel like potentially wasting my time. I did however find this: https://books.google.com/books?id=dMsIAQAAIAAJ 75.173.98.22 (talk) 22:03, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I agree that we are very nearly on the same page and that you shouldn't feel you're wasting time before consensus is reached. However, I now see that you've more or less reverted past reverts. Why are you doing this without at the very least explaining why right here, within the ongoing discussion we've established? Although we've been respectful, I still worry that we're on the precipice of an edit war, so, in order to avoid pointless back-and-forth activities, I'm calling out for help from the rest of the community. Wolfdog (talk) 14:05, 31 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I would definitely welcome assistance in making this article better. I tried to better add where citations are needed, I also took into account the your complaints about academic references being needed for the pronunciations. But, WP:NOCITE I think they fall under the "doubtful but not harmful," though I wouldn't even call the claims "doubtful" as they are back by a few example references and are easily looked up. 75.173.98.22 (talk) 19:16, 31 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your seeking better academic references, but I'm not sure what you mean by saying that certain claims can be "easily looked up." Do you mean by speakers on YouTube videos and other easily accessed recordings? I still do not hear, for example, "rio" being pronounced with a tapped "R" or "grande" being pronounced the way the IPA once again shows, and the evidence was given that "crayon" is not pronounced by the New Mexican majority the way you often hear, yet you've once again reinstated all this information and more with the same old citations. My next suggestion is for us to tack on the "Verify sources" template and, if we're going to have all that historical information, then to put it back into a "History" section. In the meantime, don't you think at this point it would be better to leave out uncited information unless you have definitive sources to back it up? I've shown how such information is uncertain and sometimes even discredited. Regarding the citations-needed information, the "doubtful but not harmful" guideline suggests "to go back and remove the claim if no source is produced within a reasonable time." Some of these claims have been here for months. When is it reasonable to finally just remove claims that continue to yield no basis in citations? Wolfdog (talk) 20:20, 31 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

RfC: Edit warring?[edit]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


I'm concerned that 75.173.98.22 and I are headed towards a respectful but developing edit war on this page. Since I'm not well versed in all WP policy, what would you recommend here? (I see that there are, for example, options like dispute resolution and third opinion.) Wolfdog (talk) 14:05, 31 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Take a break (like, have yoursalf a green chile chicken sangwidge >;-) What's the nature of the dispute?  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  02:10, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Going over this edit by edit. I don't see the point in deletion of:

Regional variants, accents, and sub-dialects exist, including aspects of Southern American English in Eastern New Mexico, and Mexican Spanish-accented English in the southern parts of New Mexico and in El Paso, Texas.[1]

and

Though it is spoken throughout the state, there is a high concentration of New Mexican English speakers in the city of Albuquerque, thus why it is sometimes called a Burqueño dialect.[2][3] New Mexican English can also be heard in the southern part of the state of Colorado, western Oklahoma and Texas, eastern Arizona, and the Navajo Nation.[1]

  1. ^ a b Busby 2004, p. 271.
  2. ^ Damian Wilson 2015.
  3. ^ Blackoutdigital 2012.
Do you believe the sourcing is being falsified?
I find the deletion of presumptively reliable sources like UNM's The New Mexico Quarterly, NPR, International Dialects of English Archive, and American English Dialects in Literature to be potentially troubling. But I'm not happy that the anon is just pasting them in. Anon, you need to use inline citation to sources, for specific facts, not just paste URLs and such into the article. When you just "drive-by" dump alleged sources in, you inspire people to add more {{refimprove}} and {{morefootnotes}} tags. You are not helping to develop the article that way. I.e., there is no such thing as "example references". That said, I'm having trouble discerning anything incorrect, or even particularly questionable being added by either of you. You both appear to know how to find sources and find information in them, and cite them (though Wolfdog has been doing a better job with citing properly). I think perhaps both of you need to focus on finding and citing information and working it in, instead of removing information the other inserts, and avoid dispute-reverting an addition unless you actually are pretty sure it's a mistake or POV-pushing case. If you feel the citation for a claim is insufficient, misused, or missing, there are inline tags for this. And yes, some of the added sources are not reliable. "Heaven Sent Gaming"? The "Shit Burqueños Say" video is hilarious and world-famous, but is a primary source. It belongs in a see-also or popular-culture section, not used as a reference. In general, as Wolfdog notes in the thread above, YouTube videos and the like showing people talking isn't reliable sourcing, it's anecdotal primary source example, that may reflect personal idiosyncrasies.
If this had come up a couple of years ago, I could just go over to UNM library and probably find 50 zillion sources for this, but I live in CA now. That the AFD didn't close with an unambiguous keep is evidence of how the WP:SYSTEMICBIAS factor has a strong effect sometimes on article retention. NM is not a very populous or popular place. Even a TV show as popular as Breaking Bad did nothing helpful for this dialect's recognition, since you basically never hear it; virtually all of the actors, even the Hispanics, were from somewhere else. (Same goes for the prequel show, Better Call Saul; there's virtually nothing New Mexican about it all.) We complained about this a lot when I still lived there. Most language-related academic material about the state/region is about Spanish or indigenous languages. This means it takes non-trivial work to source, meanwhile people want to rush to delete anything that doesn't sound like it's of national prominence. This urge is often misguided.
I think we all know this dialect exists. In the rural northern parts of the state, bleeding into Colorado, some of the phonetic shifts are very strong, like (in different ways) the Hibernian English of Kerry. When I was ... well, let's say I was hanging out for an entire month, 24/7, with some New Mexicans, I often had to have the Albuquerque guy interpret for me, because I couldn't always understand the guy from San Miguel County (and English was not a second language for him; he came from a population of Hispanics whose families go back to the Spanish colonial period, and he grew up bilingual, as did his parents). Anyway, all this takes is sourcing time and effort. There is no need to prove the dialect exists. That's kind of silly, really. Every large geographic area with several generations of people speaking a language (especially with strong influence from another one) has a dialect. New Mexico's was relatively isolated for some time until the coming of the railroad in 1881 (the second transcontinental railroad was completed in Deming, NM. I.e. the railroad was built from the east and the west and met in NM – it came to NM last.)  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  03:21, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think I am concerned the sources are being falsified (though possibly inadvertently or by good-faith but overly sweeping edits). For example, one issue is that the sentence "Regional variants, accents, and sub-dialects..." (as it currently stands) cites a source that does not even mention the areas of "Eastern New Mexico" or "El Paso, TX," or the Southern dialect (and, the fact that the opening clause "Though they have yet to be delineated..." was added in certainly doesn't help clear things up). Also, the Busby source is used to validate the sentence "New Mexican English can also be heard...," yet, again, this source does NOT mention any New Mexico dialect, nor even the specific geographic locations specified here as being the site of a unique dialect. I see that this Busby source (and others) and this same information keeps being added back in; the Busby source I'm fine with as a general Southwestern English citation, but not the information which has no connection to that source.
I, like you, also have no problems with the "presumptively reliable sources." As you said, it is the fact that they are being dumped in willy-nilly.
I'll admit that the anon has not particularly been removing my material; on the contrary, I've been removing theirs, because of all the citation-dumping as well as citationless info-dumping. They, however, are of the opinion that their info falls into WP:NOCITE's "doubtful but not harmful" category, though I feel that the uncited info has overstayed its welcome.
The systemic bias issue is certainly possible (and I admit I personally know next to nothing about New Mexico); however, then, it also reflects systemic bias within the academic mainstream which seems to be neglecting this dialect, according to your estimate. I've just been trying to find reliable sources. Probably the one I like best (in terms of some real example details of the dialect) isn't even any academic journal/article we've found; it's this professor's video. Do we know, for example, that this really is a pan-New Mexican dialect, or is it possibly more specific to the Albuquerque metropolitan area, or is it even broader-encompassing, like a general Southwest dialect? For example, the anon claims that they've heard the pronunciation "cran" for "crayon" by New Mexicans their whole life, yet I actually found an academic source specifically showing that less than 3% of surveyed New Mexicans use that pronunciation. So how can we know about where this apparent dialect exists except for the original research of residents (or past residents) of NM, like you and the anon? And even you NM residents' conceptions of the dialect (which seem like a good place to start amidst a lack of reliable sources) can apparently be quite inaccurate. Plus, the academic works seem to be difficult to find with any specifics.
Anyway, I also agree about the primary source comments. Can we agree to keep the primary sources separate from the main body of the article, perhaps in a popular culture or example section? Wolfdog (talk) 20:21, 1 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Wolfdog: Sounds reasonable. To clarify, I'm not submitting my own anecdotes as material to include in the article, just indicating my opinion that the article topic isn't nonsense or non-notable, and that I'm not seeing anything glaringly wrong. I agree there seem to be some overgeneralizations. E.g. I agree with the "cran" thing being not state-wide at all. Of course the dialect is not consistent statewide, though. No dialects or subdialects are tied very closely to political boundaries except where they happen to coincide with geographically isolating ones, like large bodies of water. There are ethnological as well as geographical differences. And there have been modern migration patterns influencing things just in the last 20 years. Again, I'm not making assertions about what the article should say, just suggesting that we can't actually expect uniformity. Patterns observed by one source won't be absolutely consistent throughout the area, and may contradict what some other sources report. The same is probably true in most other parts of the country.

I think the sourcing difficulty lies in the fact that this sort of thing is not a current topic of much scholarly interest. American dialects were surveyed in great detail and analyzed decades ago, and this material was published in paper journals. Not a lot of this is available online. Same goes with lots of secondary-source articles in various magazines and such.

As to the specific source disputes you outline, I think what might be going on (though it could take hours of poring over edits to be certain), is that various people have added material to the article, sometimes including citations, then other people added more, sometimes interpolating it into previous passages that had citations. This happens all the time, and it makes source X, which was cited for facts A and B, appear to be being cited for the inserted but really unsourced claims C and D. Then along comes someone who checks these citations, and removes claims not really citable to the source in question, and back comes someone crying "you're deleting sourced information!" I've seen (and been in the middle of) exactly this pattern before. I have an idea (posted separately below) for how to resolve the dispute.

 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  04:03, 2 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Suggestion: Re-word the material to separate the sourced from unsourced facts, even if it makes for a few short sentences and some paragraphs we'd like to flow better. Tag the unsourced ones with {{Citation needed}}, then post an update outlining what needs to be sourced. If after X amount of time (a week?) no citations or corrections are forthcoming, then start removing unsourced claims, in order of how badly they don't seem to fit WP:NOCITE. I agree with the general premise of NOCITE (or we'd delete probably 30$ of WP content right now), but only up to a point. WP:V policy is clear that any material that's controversial and unsourced, or improperly sourced, can be deleted. And if anyone controverts a claim in good faith, then it is in fact controversial within the meaning of WP:V. The anon needs to stop reflexively re-inserting claims as being sourced by reference X when they are not. Inserting a probably factual claim with no source and saying "see WP:NOCITE, while I actively look for a source", is not comparable to blatantly falsifying citations, nor even to inserting unsourced material without doing so and expecting it to remain there, unsourced, indefinitely.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  04:03, 2 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think I like your idea, but I'm still a bit confused. Just to clarify, why the rewording? And do you mean organizing the page into a sort of "sourced half" and an "unsourced half"? (This is something I more or less did on this dialect's old page.) And then if we need to go back to delete them, what do you mean by "start removing unsourced claims, in order of how badly they don't seem to fit"? Wouldn't they all be removed at once (after a week or so of no improvement)? Are you saying delete one that most defies WP:NOCITE and then click save? Sorry for my denseness. Wolfdog (talk) 20:31, 2 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • While reading Wikipedia:No original research, I noticed that "transcribing spoken words from audio or video sources, is not considered original research." Its from the WP:TRANSCRIPTION section, so we might be able to remove the original research issues, but I think we should discuss that first. I'm changing the lead sentence to fit in with other American English language articles, and technically New Mexican English would be a dialect and Southeastern New Mexican English would be a subdialect, though you can change that back if you disagree. 75.173.98.22 (talk) 14:15, 5 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • Though I totally agree with you've just stated, I don't think we were making that argument anyway. I assumed the phrase you quoted means that transcribing spoken words from audio or video sources, is not necessarily considered original research. However, in this case, it mostly still is original research, falling under either the WP:SYN criterion, which warns "not [to] combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources," or the WP:PRIMARY criterion, which explains "not [to] analyze, synthesize, interpret, or evaluate material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so." I'm talking particularly about the "example references" videos, many of which do not explicitly reference anything about the linguistics of New Mexican English; except, I think, for the Damian Wilson video, these videos simply offer instances or auditory "snapshots" of New Mexicans using their accent in more-or-less natural speech, which I feel is too microcosmic a strategy to really encyclopedically piece together the definitive workings of the whole dialect. Again, these videos say nothing explicitly about the dialect.
        Also, speaking of the word "dialect," it is perhaps too ill-defined at this time and simply safer to say "variety" on the page. Wolfdog (talk) 19:28, 5 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        According to the dictionary, a dialect is "a particular form of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group." I don't think its too far of a stretch to call it what it is, since Texan English follows that definition. Especially since Damien Wilson refers to it as a dialect, another thing is that I think it simplifies the wording when discussing the Southeastern New Mexican English in this article as a subdialect. 75.173.98.22 (talk) 20:46, 5 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • Re: "why the rewording?" – "to separate the sourced from unsourced facts ... [and then] tag the unsourced ones". Makes it easier to remove material that remains unsourced, and to identify what needs sourcing or better sourcing.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  03:20, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if it's relevant to this discussion, but two-thirds of the short citations in the "Notes" section do not link to anything. That makes it harder to determine what information is actually sourced. Click on any of the links to see if it jumps to a source; if not, it needs to be fixed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:23, 6 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a good example of why to not use such a citation system. It only works well in science articles on closely watchlisted pages where someone is "shepherding" the cites to make sure that the short ones never lose their long referents. There are good reasons that about 99% of WP articles do not use separate short and long cites sections; this is one of them (another is the complexity of their constructions, and a third is their frustratingness to users, since it takes them at least twice as long to find the name of the work that was cited).  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  07:45, 4 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Fix refs, regional vanity article, any actual linguists here?[edit]

  • Hey. I can try to clean up the refs, but this (sorry, PhD in Linguistics here) strikes me as a regional vanity article. If you can find enough support in sources for calling it a dialect, then by all means do so. But the evidence for an actual variety of English seems conspicuously thin. You've got a little bit of phonology that is shared with other geographical regions; you've got little dash of loanwords -- no sociocultural depth, etc. It might be legitimate to call this a dialect, but I very strongly doubt you could call it a variety. And a variety is exactly what is meant when you call something "[place name] English" instead of "[place name] dialect" (though "dialect" has pejorative connotations that make it less than desirable) or "[placename] accent". A page move to Burqueno dialect with might be appropriate, but so I think might outright deletion. Depends on support in the literature for the former. For more on varieties of English:

Kachru employed the term “non-native institutionalized varieties” (NNIV) in the same contexts as other have used “New Englishes.” The characteristics he lists for these varieties are: 1. they have an extended range of uses in the sociolinguistic context of a nation; 2. they have an extended register and style range; 3. a process of nativization of the registers and styles has taken place, both in formal and in contextual terms; and 4. a body of nativized English literature has developed which has formal and contextual characteristics which mark it as local (Kachru 1992: 55)

Similarly, Platt et al. (1984: 2–3) suggest that a language should meet the following four criteria in order to be considered as a New English: 1. It has developed through the education system [including being] taught as a subject and used as a language of instruction for other courses. 2. It is has developed in an area where a native variety of English was not the prevalent language. [However, pidgins and creoles are explicitly excluded]. 3. It is used for a range of functions among those who speak or write it in the region where it is used. It is used in many different physical and pragmatic contexts: correspondence, creative literature, for government documents, in the media, sometimes as a language used in the home... and used as a lingua franca. 4. It has become “localised” [or indigenized, as discussed previously] by adopting new... sounds, intonation patterns, sentence structures, words [and] expressions [and, usually, some sociolinguistic norms of expression.]

Aside from Platt’s first criterion, a high degree of overlap is noticeable in these lists. Kachru implicitly assumes the non-nativeness made explicit by Platt’s second condition. The third and forth conditions in Platt’s list could be considered a restatement of Kachru’s first and third conditions, respectively. In a similar vein, Butler (1997: 106) offers a five-part response to the question, “What makes a variety of English?” Her oft-cited answer is: 1. A standard and recognizable pattern of pronunciation handed down from one generation to another. 2. Particular words and phrases which spring usually to express key features of the physical and social environment and which are regarded as peculiar to the variety. 3. A history -- a sense that this variety of English is the way it is because of the history of the language community. 4. A literature written without apology in that variety of English. 5. Reference works -- dictionaries and style guides -- which show that people in that language community look to themselves, not some outside authority, to decide what is right and wrong in terms of how they speak and write their English.

In the context of (5) above, Butler was the editor (in 1981) of The Macquarie Dictionary, which has done much to legitimize Australian English in the eyes of both the international community and of Australians themselves.

Well, I'll look into the sources listed, but.... • ArchReader 11:46, 8 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • @ArchReader: We just very recently had a deletion discussion for this article but, unfortunately, an administrator determined that the result was "no consensus" after we skeptics already went through some of the very same doubts you now mention. Please have a look at that discussion and give me your thoughts. I personally feel that no full-bodied discussion ever really occurred; mostly only a single, anonymous user ever replied to me and countered my arguments. I was the nominator for deletion. Wolfdog (talk) 21:06, 8 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Although I've been trying to just clean up the article since the "no consensus" (in two days, I'm planning on deleting all the "citation needed" speculation), I agree that this is not clearly a variety vs. a dialect due what I've repeatedly mentioned during the deletion discussion: that no source yet has in any basic way simply defined New Mexican English. There are sources that give some examples of its vocabulary or vaguely locate it geographically, but there is still no attempt at a comprehensive definition. Is it Albuquerque-based? Why does it seem to be NOT spoken by many New Mexicans and yet we're calling it "New Mexican English"? (See my related "crayon" comments.) Has any credible source robustly studied its phonological system? These and other questions still frustratingly remain. Also, as you can see above, I became overwhelmed by concerns that another user and I were starting an edit war. If you have any constructive ideas here, let us know. "Burqueño dialect" might be the first big new idea (though only a single source we've noticed, and possibly in the universe, seems to use that term). Wolfdog (talk) 21:06, 8 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • I think the title "New Mexican English" is patently inappropriate. This puts it on a level with "Australian English" or "African-American English" or "Standard American English" or other extremely well-delineated and well-attested varieties. As for calling it a dialect, that is certainly possible, but even that is kinda dubious, in my (initial) opinion. Once again, did you folks ping WP:Linguistics for some thoughts? If you have only one source in the Universe that is calling this a dialect – is that is a peer-reviewed journal, or a YouTube video? – but well, with only one source, and that not peer-reviewed, then either Delete or run the danger that you might possibly be following the guidance of WP:Randy. I'm sorry to say that. I strongly suggest you get hard-core linguists to chime in (if they will, which I doubt, why would they bother getting in a flame war over trivia?) However, above all, this is a debate about WP:RS, and linguists might be able to help you identify what is or isn't WP:RS • ArchReader 21:37, 8 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • It's a reasonable title but does not match the original defining work, which uses New Mexic'o' English. See Characteristic features of New Mexico English between 1805 and 1890 by W.A. Heflin published by University of Chicago Press, 1941. Skyerise (talk) 22:59, 8 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
          • That's an unpublished dissertation. Plus it's only one unpublished dissertation. PLus the title of a dissertation does not give a meaningful summary of any definition or qualifications in the dissertation. It may simply be an imprecise title. • ArchReader 01:28, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
            • The title "New Mexican English" is not patently inappropriate, as it does not place it any level, other than at a level playing field. Neighboring English dialects including Texan English and Californian English are named as such as to not patently hide hyper delineated language subsets. Another language within the state New Mexican Spanish, is often not referred to as such, but to maintain a level of consistency within Wikipedia, New Mexican Spanish and New Mexican English make since. You can find people in Las Vegas, New Mexico speaking a variety of this dialect, so referring to it as solely Albuquerquean or Burqueño dialect would be patently inappropriate. If this were called the Burqueño English dialect, then I would then believe that this was "regional vanity article", but as New Mexican English I do not believe it to be true. New Mexico is 2.5x larger than England, meaning that I wouldn't classify this as a "regional vanity article". There is no reason to assume that everyone would call this dialect the same, and to expect as much seems silly. @Wolfdog: remember what SMcCandlish ☺ said, "That the AFD didn't close with an unambiguous keep is evidence of how the WP:SYSTEMICBIAS factor has a strong effect sometimes on article retention." I completely agree with that user, and is still believe that this is a major factor in the ongoing debate surrounding this article. 75.173.98.22 (talk) 05:04, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • A few observations, properly formatted sources, etc.:
    • Not a professional linguist, but have a bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology and linguistics, and lived in NM a long time. Honestly, I don't think lack of subject-matter experts here is the problem, but difficulty of finding sources. A whole army of linguists won't help us if they can't find the articles and stuff we need to cite.
    • Wikipedia's editorship (among other people, but especially that pool of people) is collectively very confused about any difference between a variety and a dialect (and various conceptually related terms), due to WP:ENGVAR and other cases of studious internal avoidance of ever using the world "dialect" on Wikipedia because of non-linguists' belief that the term is pejorative in some way. This prejudice has been notably creeping out of the WP: namespace and into articles. So, there really is no big junk-waving contest to be had here about what word to use in this article. I doubt anyone among its actual content editors cares. Just follow the sources on this, and the political correctness camp trying to spread WP-internal jargon into public facing articles can just go get bent.
    • Whether anyone has an opinion about "regional vanity" or not is basically irrelevant. Either it passes WP:GNG or it does not. If I could delete every article I think is questionably encyclopedic and some form of topical vanity, we'd have thousands fewer articles, but I don't get to set policy by fiat. If we have multiple reliable secondary sources, that's the end of the deletion question, and this already survived AFD, when it was a worse article with fewer sources. I think we're done with that question.
    • Third, we don't have any evidence the topic of this article is limited to Albuquerque, and of course it isn't, so the idea of moving this to Albuquerque English or Burqueño English is a no-go; that's a local subtopic.
    • "New Mexico" when used as an adjective is synonymous with "New Mexican"; some prefer the former because it is more clearly distinguishable from "new Mexican" (lower-case n). It's common for "New X" place names to be used in the same form adjectivally as they are found in their noun state (e.g. "New Zealand news" juxtaposed with "Australian News" and "British News"), but it's more common if the derived form would end in -er. A source published in 1941 doesn't tell us anything about present-day usage anyway (I see another paper from the same period referring to "American Negro English", just to make that point really clear). Some older sources even hyphenate it as "New-Mexican" when used adjectivally. These style divergences can be ignored. This has to be said so many times I've turned it into a template, {{ATandMOS}}: As we've been over many, many times before: The WP:COMMONNAME policy (part of WP:AT) tells us what the most common name is (e.g. "New Mexican English" vs. "Nuevomexicano English"); once we know what it is, WP:MOS tells us how to style it (e.g. "New Mexican English" vs. "New-Mexican English"). WP:AT, and its topical naming-convention guidelines, explicitly defer to MOS on style matters. In this specific case: MOS doesn't direct us to hyphenate this sort of thing, or to avoid adjectival forms (-an here), or to reword into an "of" construction, so there's no case for renaming on WP:MOS grounds.
    • It could be moved New Mexico English or English in New Mexico, with little if any effect on content. However, this article's title, as someone else noted, is consistent with Californian English, etc., and WP:CONSISTENCY is a policy, even if not the most important naming policy we have. I think there would have to be a serious reason to move the article, on WP:AT grounds, and I see no WP:RM discussion open, anyway.
    • This source gives a glossary of Spanish loanwords adopted into the regional English: Bloom, L. B. (1933). New Mexico History and Civics. pp. 523–527. JSTOR doesn't actually have its text, though.
    • We can add the fact that English was only spoken in a few places in the state a century ago, sourced to Tucker Dracass, Carrie E. (October 1908). "Spanish in the Secondary Schools". School Review. 16 (8): 538–542. [I]n New Mexico English has gotten a foot-hold only in a few places, such as Albuquerque, Roswell, et al.
    • I can get the following full source from JSTOR, evidenciary of "significant contrast" between "standard" English and that spoken by bilingual and even English-monoglot students in Las Vegas, NM; it's also a source for New Mexico English, at least among Hispanics, being part of a more broadly and socially defined dialect, termed "Chicano English" when this was published in the '70s: Rodrigues, Raymond J. (September–December 1976). "A Statistical Review of the English Syntax of Bilingual Mexican American and Monolingual Anglo American Students". Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe. 3 (3: Bilingualism in the Bicentennial): 2005–212.. It has some historical background on English, schooling, and Anglo-American settlement in San Miguel Co., and of course lots of material about the syntactic study that is the focus of the paper. One interesting bit is that the Anglo and Hispanic students form one population according to the syntax usage data (i.e., it's a regional dialect, not an ethnic one), but Hispanic students were scoring lower on standardized tests, presumably for other socio-cultural reasons (I haven't read the whole thing, so I'm not sure what it concluded about that).
    • Spanish spoken in the state is also considered a distinct variety in at least one source (which also covered that of another US state in the same chapter): Lipski, John M. (2008). "Traditional Varieties: New Mexico and Louisiana". Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington DC: Georgetown U. Pr. pp. 191–222.
    • This one's fun: Pearce, T. M. (October 1946). "The English Proverb in New Mexico". California Folklore Quarterly. 5 (4). Western States Folklore Society: 350–354. I doubt it would contribute much to the article though.
    • The New Mexico Folklore Society [1], the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association [2], the American Dialect Society [3], and similar groups might be worth contacting to ask about paper source materials; they may well have published some in their own journals. Check also if The New Mexican and Santa Féan magazines have backissues online; I'd be surprised if neither of them hasn't had an article on this topic. The reference desks at the UNM and NMSU libraries might be able to help (forget ENMU; it's not much more than a community college).
    • Look for general sources on Mexican American, Hispanic, Chicano, Latino, and Southwest[ern]/South-West[ern] American English; many may have material about NM in particular. Some don't; Bayley's promising-sounding "Relativization Strategies in Mexican-American English" only studied Texan and Southern Californian dialects. Thompson's "Mexican-American English: Social Correlates of Regional Pronunciation" only covers Austin, Texas, though it confirms some of what our article got from elsewhere, that Southwestern US English has both Southern US and Midland US English influences. The article is probably of more value in a broader article on Southwestern American English. Its observation that Hispanics moving into Texas cities since the 1960s in large numbers are there "largely as a result of migration from rural areas in [the state] rather than immigration from Mexico", at the same time that Anglo-American migration is happening from all over the country at the time time, instead of the former more predictable westward land migration of white settlers, is also true of modern population changes in New Mexico (and southern Colorado, and Arizona). The article is basically a case-study of the effects of this on English in one Texas city, in a region that other sources will confirm have undergone similar and concurrent changes in settlement patterns.
    • One of the previously mentioned sources (Rodrigues, citing Metcalf (1973), I think citing other's work) discussed how California research showed that a Hispanic accent did not affect wage earnings if English proficiency was high, in California. This one comes to the opposite conclusion in New Mexico and Texas (albeit 20 years later, and 20+ years BP): Dávila, Alberto; Bohara, Alok K.; Saenz, Rogelio (December 1993). "Accent Penalties and the Earnings of Mexican Americans". Social Science Quarterly. 74 (4). Austin: U. of Texas Pr.: 902–916. (joint UNM / Texas A&M study).
    • Something or other useful may also be found in: Fraser, Howard M. (January–August 1975). "Languages in Contact: A Bibliographic Guide to Linguistic Borrowings Between English and Spanish". Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe. 2 (1/2): 138–172.
    • Anyway, I don't have all night to look for this stuff. If you don't have JSTOR and other journal-archive access, go ask for it at WP:LIBRARY. I only checked JSTOR, and only a handful of pages of search results.
    • Picking on this article is pretty WP:LAME, given how well it's developed so far, compared to, e.g. Western American English, which is just a stub.
 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  08:44, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I strongly agree with your argument, but draw the opposite conclusion. If you read what I said, i said we should only care about WP:RS. Show the WP:RS, and everyone has to shut up. But I disagree we have RS to support the existence NM English; I agree we have very very good RS for Mexican English. This article should be either deleted or merged into Mexican English, because of a lack of sources for NM English. WP:Consistency and WP:Otherstuff are flatly contradictory, as I'm sure many have noted... I am simply suggesting that you cannot use the title of a lone (and very outdated) dissertation as supporting evidence. You have to produce its supporting content, and even better, also produce sources that cite that supporting content. That would be a real argument. If you are saying this article should not be limited to Albuquerque, then you are probably right, and in fact you are supporting my argument for deletion or page move. My underlying point is that if such a dialect exists, in order to name it NM English or even NM dialect, and thus restrict it to NM, you'd have to show that it is not widely spoken outside the borders of NM. I doubt that is possible. So show me WP:RS sources for NM English. If you can do so, then good, the legitimacy of this article has been objectively established. Oh and PS, I strongly disagree that this article is well-developed, unless by well-developed you mean "contains many words". The words are not supported by RS. We have cookbooks (not written in NM English) and travel guides (not written in NM English) and newsclips (that do not contain more than 2 words I would not use) and God knows what else.. nothing... nothing.. nothing.. that establishes the existence of NM English. Just stuff that's related on the surface. It's just fluff. • ArchReader 09:16, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You're clearly worked up about this, but you don't appear to be understanding the argument I'm making. Lipski, Dávila, and various other sources I dug up with barely-past-trivial effort demonstrate that New Mexican English (or New Mexico English, or English in New Mexico, or English of New Mexico, or Nuevomexicano English, or Neomexicano English, or Novomexicano English, or Southwestern English west of most of Texas and east of most of Arizona – take your pick) has been treated as a distinguishable topic in multiple reliable sources (none of these go into detail about specific differences between NM English and other varieties, but I never suggested they did, and I really WP:DGAF.). I'm not relying on anything presently in the article at all. The entire thing could be blanked, and I could write a new stub about this topic, and it would survive WP:AFD, because it will pass the WP:GNG. The material I have found is about historic treatment, pedagogy, etc., not morphological differences. But it's still valid material within the scope. (I don't think the whole thing should be blanked, per WP:POINT, but I agree with WolfDog's plan to remove the {{citation needed}}-tagged material. He's been very programmatic and patient in addressing this article's problems.) I'm also not making any argument about the fluff in the article, though in previous discussion, I've said much of that "source" material is really "In popular culture" and "External links" material, since much of it's primary source stuff that either illustrates usage (some of it more local than the whole scope of the article; Albuquerque/Burqueño dialect is a subtopic), or treats it from a trivial point of view. I'm not even making any argument about the differences between NM and other Southwestern American English variants (haven't found clear sources for those yet), from a regional perspective, and haven't presented much yet on differences between NM English as spoken by Hispanics vs. other forms of Hispanic English usage, from an ethno-cultural perspective (not much sourcing yet, but a little). I don't disagree that various fluff in the article can be deleted.

The weird thing is, you seem to be demanding more fluff, since your criticisms of a bunch of the weak sources already provided are "not written in NM English ... not written in NM English ... that do not contain more than 2 words I would not use". But we don't need any more (or any at all) sources written in NM English (which is principally a spoken dialectal variation, not written, like all other variations among US dialects, and across the pond, between UK dialects; people in Manchester don't actually write much if any differently from those in Cornwall or London). You seem to be asking for written-in-dialect material that wouldn't normally exist, unless someone were joking (as I was in my "sangwidge" comment the other week, above). No reliable source would be written in "eye dialect" like that. We need sources about NM English, not in it. We don't ask for sources written in Manx itself to write an article about the Manx language (I think it only cites one, out of 70+, and only for a translation example).

The Platt theory above about what constitutes "an English" is not really relevant to WP, since no consensus discussion here has ever chained our article naming (e.g. Texan English, Californian English, etc.) to that primary-sourced hypothesis/framework. For WP:AT purposes, they're just descriptive phrases that are more concise and more common than "English of Texans" or "English as spoken by native Californians", or pick any other blathery construction.

"Mexican English" doesn't even make any sense except as a disambiguation page. The Mexico-connected Hispanic populations of various parts of the US have radically different histories, as does their absorption of and influence on regional forms of English. A large proportion of some of these populations are not "Mexican" in any useful meaning of the word, being nativos descended from families living on the same land since Nueva España in the Spanish Colonial era; they did not immigrate to modern NM, California, Texas, etc. from Mexico, though Hispanic populations have swelled with those who have. None of which relates to English spoken in Mexico, a totally different topic also encompassed by the WP:PRECISION failure that a title like "Mexican English" would be (and English as spoken in Mexico would probably be the primary topic for that phrase, anyway).

Lastly, WP:CONSISTENCY, a naming policy, and WP:OTHERCRAP, a deletion essay, don't conflict; they simply don't relate at all.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  11:17, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish and ArchReader: ArchReader, I admit I never knew of any clear and widely agreed distinction between "variety" and "dialect," though I knew "dialect" was more controversial in its blurred distinction from the word "language." But as far as I ever know, "variety" was the most neutral and PC way to describe a language variant possible. But, SMCCandlish, in doing away with the PC police, as you say, let's then just look at the actual sources: What do they in fact call "New Mexican English"? Ol' YouTuber Damian Wilson (CV), apparently a Hispanic (and I notice, not Anglicist) Linguist, calls it a dialect. The Encyclopedia.com article non-technically refers to it as a mixture. And the Balukas & Koops text, by the way, seems to equate "[placename] English" with a variety. What else do we have here for WP:RS? I still agree with ArchReader that we need to keep hunting down those sources and a (non-peer-reviewed) YouTube video as our best source so far is depressing at best. Wolfdog (talk) 20:22, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Rodrigues also uses "dialect" repeatedly. I too have concurred to keep source-hunting, and have been doing so.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  01:20, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • @SMcCandlish: The reason I kinda ignored all yourr sources is because they aren't sources. Lipski is about Spanish, but this page is supposed to be about English. Proverbs? Proverbs do not add a thing, as you noted. You listed some possible places where someone could possibly search, but there are no actual sources in your long post. The reason it took you no effort to dig that info up is because you retrieved no results. No really. I'm not exaggerating for effect. I really mean "no results." It took you "no effort" to retrieve "no results". If this would be kept at AfD, then AfD has absolutely no idea what a WP:RS is. So go find some. You still have zero-point-zero. • ArchReader 23:54, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You're simply not reading carefully, and I'm done wasting time on circular argumentation with you.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  01:20, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Find sources[edit]

  • I give up on the thread I started (above). There is a willful disregard of both WP:RS and WP:GNG that I find profoundly confusing.So let's try, shall we:
    • New Mexican English att Google scholar, eight results. The least likely-looking ("Ho! To the land of sunshine") only has two references two New Mexican English-language newspapers. The article about fertility is a formatting false positive. "Reading America" also seems to be a false positive. The Cacoullos article might have something, but it certainly isn't about New Mexican English, and it probably merely uses the term loosely once or twice. You could look at it & see... Wait, there's a conference paper (11th High Desert Linguistics Conference), and the contributor who's name-dropping New Mexican English is Balukas, whose conference paper became the article that tops the results ("Spanish-English bilingual voice onset time ..."), and who already appears on the reference page of this article. If you are feeling WP:BOLD, you could email her very politely (I'm not gonna). [Note: If you do email, ask specifically for sources establishing or dealing with "New Mexican English" as a distinct dialect or a distinct topic of study.] I wouldn't accept one lone article as sufficient for establishing WP:GNG, but perhaps Baluka knows of more?
    • Google books has 13 results, the vast majority of which are formatting false positives.
  • In the end, I see.... one possible source. Just one. It sorta looks maybe promising, but even that one doesn't really seem to present strong evidence. • ArchReader 01:21, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@ArchReader: So I emailed Prof. Balukas some 12 days ago; no response yet. Wolfdog (talk) 20:06, 27 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've been trying in vain, I guess, to get across this simple message: We have sources about English in New Mexico, and can base the article around such facts and sources, without having to even address the question of whether this "is" a dialect, according to whom. The history of English in NM is itself an intrinsically encyclopedic topic, even without any documenting or posturing about classification. Over time, that question will answer itself as more sources turn up. Need to head over to WT:LIBRARY and see what they think the best of the journal search options available are for linguistic materials. I've had disappointing results with JSTOR so far.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  03:37, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Heaven Sent Gaming and WP expectations[edit]

@217.23.5.77, 37.143.14.157, and 67.0.225.110: Hello various anons, it appears that you may feel we need to talk about the HSG site. This has already been discussed elsewhere, but we don't seem to be on the same page about what constitutes credible sources or even just the general credibility of information on WP. If you feel the need to talk it out, let's go ahead and do it here please. Wolfdog (talk) 17:22, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What's the story?  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  06:29, 22 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Merge with Chicano English?[edit]

Stale
 – No consensus arose; a geographically defined dialect and an ethnically defined sociolect don't merge well.

These two subjects are completely different, I definitely do not agree with them being merged. People of varying backgrounds in New Mexico speak with this accent. JoinerFact (talk) 03:27, 18 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, these are not at all the same topic, or related enough to merge. It's like trying to merge Southern American English into African American vernacular English; in both cases it would be an identical confusion of geographic language use (dialect) with ethnic (cultural) and subcultural register / code.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  06:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 24 October 2015[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move. There is consensus that the current title may be confusing and that the proposed title will alleviate that confusion. Cúchullain t/c 20:00, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]



New Mexican EnglishEnglish in New Mexico – Uncommonly among US states, the "[Adjective form of placename] English" pattern as a name for regional English-language dialect is not actually used consistently for English in New Mexico. Furthermore, the article's attempt to focus on demonstrating that New Mexican English is consistently regarded as a recognizable dialect or dialect continuum, like Texan English or California English, has been remarkably, surprisingly difficult to source. While I lived there for a long time and know that it's true, we just don't have enough WP:RS, despite months of looking for them, to write that article, and much of the present content and its weak sourcing is already disputed. Furthermore, "New Mexican English" is ambiguous (in two ways, the obvious one being "does this mean 'Mexican English that's new?', the other being related to the ethnonym Nuevomexicano). Even if we can eventually write that dialect material and then have an article that focuses on that, the title would be better as "New Mexico English". Until more American linguistic journals are online in full text, however, there's not enough material to write that article anyway.[In spoken English there'd be less ambiguity, since there'd be a difference between "N'Mexican English" and "new Mexican English".]

What we can write, now and with readily available sources, is an article about the history of English in New Mexico – it's introduction, by people from where, over what time span; how it interacted with the already extant local languages, indigenous and Spanish; how it has developed demographically; what the state's policies are with regard to it; etc. We can also include, to the minor extent we can source them so far, the two identified subregional dialects we do have names for: Burqueño, centered on Albuquerque, and Northern New Mexico Chicano English, across the top of the state and bleeding into southern Colorado. The result of this combined material would be an article on English in New Mexico, not an alleged New Mexican English dialect. The fact that I know it really is one is insufficient to maintain the status quo mess at this page. If and when we finally find some stockpile of sources on New Mexic[o|an] English we can rewrite and rescope needed. For now, we need a catch-all descriptive disambiguation / concept disambiguation / general history page that affords room to follow the sources, not try to bend the sources to fit into an artificial "we must write about this as a dialect, only" box.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  09:35, 24 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support, since the term "New Mexican English" sounds more like a new version of English used in Mexico. Snowsuit Wearer (talk|contribs) 09:50, 24 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, in accord with Snowsuit Wearer and SMcCandlish's views. This name change will more likely lead readers to avoid mistakenly believing there is some one unified language variety the page is talking about (though the rename would also require some change to the wording of the article as it currently stands). See the recent posts on Talk:Chicano English#Merger proposal (New Mexican English to Chicano English) to read more discussion on this matter. Wolfdog (talk) 12:00, 24 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. The current title sounds like the name of a dialect. From looking at the page, I don't get the sense that it is. There is no "Dictionary of New Mexican English" or anything like that. There is just a pair of Youtube videos and various parodies of how New Mexicans say things. Gulangyu (talk) 12:37, 24 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment, "English in New Mexico" seems to imply that it is the secondary language for the place, I can literally find no other U.S. State or English primary region that uses "English in...", the only articles that do are places that do not primarily speak English, see English in Puerto Rico and English in Barbados. I'm still in favor of "New Mexican English", as I can find "New Mexican English" in a several sources, Spanish-English bilingual VOT in spontaneous code-switching, Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel, Problems in applied educational sociolinguistics, 11th High Desert Linguistics Conference, [4]; I can also see numerous people proclaiming that they themselves, or have direct contact with people whom, speak "New Mexican English"; upenn.edu, Blender Artists, Los Santos Role Play, chicken recipe on tripod, and a novel titled Nobody's Damsel By E.M. Tippetts. JoinerFact (talk) 02:09, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • There's no naming convention that suggests such an interpretation, and see English language in England, etc. We name articles as we need to name them; there is no "prohibition" on naming an article in way proposed here based on what can be reliably sourced. I find it odd and disconcerting that you have brought this argument here almost word-for-word after it was already addressed at Talk:Chicano English#Merger proposal (New Mexican English to Chicano English). Please see WP:ICANTHEARYOU.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  05:40, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • Meant nothing by it, you are correct in bringing up English language in England, but in that regard refers to encompasses the collective of dialects in English English; Southern English dialects, West Country dialects, East and West Midlands English dialects and Northern English dialects, Welsh English, Irish English and Scottish English. I don't think the same argument could be made for New Mexican English, which seems to center solely around the Albuquerque-Santa Fe-Las Vegas, NM Combined Statistical Area. Other variations of which have been found by Wolfdog and other users, examples being the El Paso and Northern New Mexico Chicano English; but all sources describing those variations compare it to an unnamed dialect of standard New Mexico English. I very much like your "New Mexico English" proposal as it strikes a fair bit of reasoning to the subject at hand. Which seems to be delineated as some kind of hinted dialect in New Mexico of the American English language. I'm just legitimately confused about the naming conventions of languages here on Wikipedia. JoinerFact (talk) 08:20, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • I think a lot of us are also somewhat confused. Why, for instance do the two main branches of Mid-Atlantic American English use dissimilar naming conventions: Philadelphia English and Baltimore accent? Don't know... but I assume different editors with different reasons at different times. Discussions to try to come up with some standardized conventions have occurred, e.g. here, but they've usually petered out or only involved a handful of editors contributing ideas; there's also the briefly-worded WP:NCL. Until some universal standard is established, we go for the name that best hits upon the criteria of being both well-sourced AS WELL AS unambiguous. Wolfdog (talk) 11:02, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
          • Basically, they're different because there is no hard-and-fast naming policy for English language variety articles. We name them whatever makes the most sense on a case-by-case basis, running the WP:AT criteria "gauntlet" for the case in question. (In theory at least; no every naming decision or renaming discussion perfectly reflects that). I haven't looked at those articles in any detail, but it's fairly likely that there's also a reliable sourcing difference that establishes one as a linguistically recognized regional dialect, and the other as much narrower city-wide accent? Or it might just have been, as you suggest, the opinion of whoever bothered to show up for the discussion. Part of the reason these particular sorts of discussions are fragmentary and poorly attended is the counterproductive project split between WP:LING and WP:LANG. The latter should merge back into the former, and we'd probably have enough language-focused editors to come up with some naming conventions. If they did, I'm certain they'd still arrive at the conclusion that "X English" titles should not be used when such a dialect with such a name is not evident from sufficient reliable sources, but would agree that "English in x" is a perfectly valid WP:DESCRIPTDIS title for an article about this history and usage of English in a notable geographic region, whether it can be linguistically identified as a cohesive dialect or not.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  08:07, 30 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • (ec) @JF: See the history of the English language in England and related renames. It had nothing at all to do with geographical breadth of coverage, but was solely because the original name was misleading/confusing. I.e., it does not require some special rule to invoke a rename to "English in X", just a consensus that it makes more sense than "X English".  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  08:00, 30 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Varieties[edit]

A few months ago, I tagged the "Varieties" section with an "Expand section" template. I still, for example, continue to be baffled by the difference between the "Burqueño dialect" and the "Northern New Mexican (Chicano) dialect," as well as between the latter and a purported Northern New Mexican (non-Chicano) dialect. Can someone break these down into clear distinctions (phonologically, lexically, grammatically, etc.)? I've been told that these distinctions are made clear in Form and function in Chicano English by Jacob Ornstein-Galicia, Chicano English by Allan A. Metcalf, and Chicano English: An Ethnic Contact Dialect by Joyce Penfield. Can anyone who has access to those sources (I frustratingly do not), verify this and help include this information on this WP page? Thank you. Wolfdog (talk) 17:04, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I can't do it with handy sources. I don't think Chicano English ones are liable to help much, because they always seem to be just about CA and TX. NM-specific sources are more likely targets, especially sociological or ethnographical stuff coming out of its own state universities, I would imagine. I don't have any at hand. I keep meaning to look on some journal sites I got access to but I get distracted by other things. Just to help steer the looking, I can answer some of the "what's a the difference" questions, informally. Plus some state history stuff that may be relevant, like the Archbishop Lamy, and the Maxwell Land Grant (I think I covered the coming of the railroad last time I blathered on about this stuff).
Deets
Burqueño is the urban and suburban dialect, mostly lower-to-middle-class and mostly of Hispanics and others who mingle with them (plus some appropriation by trust-fund kids). It affects the English to some extent of other locals of the general Albuquerque area, including parts of Sandoval Co., etc., and the "regional diaspora" out of the city, e.g. in Rio Rancho. Some also include Santa Fe. It's a confluence of Northern New Mexican [Hispanic] English, Southwestern [white] English, modern "urban" influences, the General American of national news, recent-immigrant Mexican Spanish, school-taught Spanish, and so forth. There are also English influences from all over the country due to Kirtland Air Force Base being in ABQ. The urban dialect changes a lot over time. If you go to a public high school, or a sports bar, that's not in an upper-crusty neighborhood of Albuquerque, you'll hear a lot of Burqueño. The more Hispanic you are and the more "in the hood", the thicker it is, but you can hear it even among white farmers' kids up in the Sandia Mountains above the city (my GF at the time taught junior high English and basketball up there), who probably use it to irritate their redneck parents, who use New Mexico's version of the Southwestern drawl.

Northern New Mexican English is a product of isolation, and is traditional and not very synchretic. As far I can tell it survives in roughly Española and Las Vegas (NM), into southern Colorado, is rural (not how people talk in Santa Fe or Taos today, mostly), and mostly limited to Hispanics from families who've been in the area since colonial times. It may not have cohesively existed until the early 20th century, since they all just spoke NNM Spanish before that, and mostly still do when amongst each other, at least among pre-Millennials. It has curious vowel shifts that are just isolation products, and don't track trends in English or Spanish that I know of. That happens thoughout the state a little (there's a "Saven-Elaven" joke webpage about this at [5], but they're not getting all shifts correct ("pillow" and "milk" become "pellow" and "melk", not "pallow" and "malk"; they're confusing that with the "self" and "deck" shift to "salf" and "dack". These shifts are so strong in northerners of the state it can be hard to understand them occasionally, as when they shift a word into another one (e.g. "sex" can come out as "sacks").

Both NNME and Burqueño are distinct from English used by reservation-raised Native Americans in the area, very local dialects with strong influences from both the indigenous substrate language (not always in the same language family; Navajo and Jicarilla are Athabaskan, some in the area like Hopi are Uto-Aztecan, and some are isolates like Zuñi), plus whatever schooling was introduced in either Spanish or English at different periods. The Zuñis I knew from near the Arizona border had a strong Spanish-leaning accent, heavily converting English /ɪ/ into Spanish /i/, etc., but in that generation (ca. mid-30s around 2010), not fluent in Spanish at all; it's an accent picked up from the previous generation. The Navajo around Santa Fe don't sound anything like that.

I don't know about a NNM "Chicano" vs. a NNM "non-Chicano" dialect; the whites in the state who are native but don't have much of a trace of Hispanic influence in their speech mostly are hard to distinguish from West Texans in speech patterns, at least with regard to the ones I grew up around; some are trying to drop this accent for class-projection reasons, and may be hard to distinguish from Denverites or Phoenix residents; rurally, it's lots of "y'all" and "ain't" and "singin'", and "pitchur" for "picture", as in west TX and OK. In the north, there are lots of multi-generational and rather isolated Euro-American/white/gringo farm and ranching communities up there, like the appropriately named Farmington in the NW, and most of Colfax Co. (Angel Fire, Cimarron, and Eagle Nest) in the NE; as far as I know, these were mostly settled by people moving in from TX, OK, and KS. Cimarron claims to be "the Cowboy Capital of the World". "They're all for realz about it, even", as a Burqueño would put it. Maybe they really do have a distinct NNM Anglo English up there; I don't know. I spent some time in these places as a child, but nothing stuck in my head about the lingo; most of the people I interacted with were hunters and such from other places (my grandfather had a ranch and lodge in Eagle Nest that was used for hunting and fishing trips). The presence of Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron has had an effect (it has a large, mostly white, and mostly non-NM support staff living in the area, since ca. 1940). Springer, in the same county, has been home to a juvenile detention facility for several generations, and is a white-dominated area with a strong state government presence. The Maxwell Land Grant had a great deal to do with the influx of whites to the area; successive owners of large parcels of that larger mega-parcel took pains to evict Hispanics living there since the late 1700s (who most likely moved a county over), well into the 20th century. Between Farmington and Colfax is a whole lot of land, much of it predominantly Hispanic, rural, and mountainous. Places like Mora County are mostly populated by people of Colonial Hispanic descent (apparently with some admixture of Texans in the mid-1800s in the town of Mora's case), and there have also long been white ranchers in the area, but they were very much in the minority. My family also had land outside Mora town, and it was like being in a foreign country when we went there. Most of the people speak Spanish (very regional, not Mexican-immigrant Spanish) at home and in public unless they need to use English, and their English is hard to follow, the NNM Hispanic kind, and often not fluent, at least among the older generations; I'm sure the kids are fully by now.

I don't think NNM Hispanic English should be called "Chicano"; these people don't seem identify that way, or did not when I was there. The Chicano movement that has been centered in Los Angeles and with a related movement in borderland Texas is like something happening in another country to people in rural NNM; it's something that has to do with those other people, who have south-of-the-border origins. Like folks in Portugal observing Portuguese-pride activities in Brazil. Some of them have a lot of scorn for "Mexicans" (nationals and recent descendants thereof) and for gringos alike. I think the same mistake is often made with Hispanics, in treating them as a unified mega-culture by outsiders, as is made with regard to "Celtic" people in Wales and Brittany and Ireland and so on. Yes, there are cultural and socio-political connections, but they're tenuous and it doesn't translate into a strong sense of commonality between people from distinct places in the Spanish-connected U.S., or between people in western Ireland with those in Cardiff or Edinburgh.

Anyway, the NNM Hispanic population has its own religious and other cultural traditions (see, e.g. Penitentes (New Mexico); they have more influence in the rural parts than actual Catholic clergy do), and when the Church sent a Frenchman to be the archbishop (Jean-Baptiste Lamy) in the mid-1800s in Santa Fe, this caused a lot of the Spanish (as they self-labeled, and still do) of the area to kind of retreat into their own ways, and they never really came back into the Catholic mainstream. These ways used to span much of the top half of the state, at least, but a huge influx of gringos into Santa Fe, Taos, Los Alamos, and Albuquerque since the mid-20th century has changed things a lot in the more populated areas.

Well, none of that is usable directly for the article other than the timeline items which are sourced in articles on the Maxwell Grant, Lamy, Penitentes, etc., but might indicate some avenues of looking, e.g. cultural history materials pertaining to places like Mora County and neighboring rural ones, especially Rio Arriba, Sandoval, San Miguel, and Taos counties. (and I really know nothing about some parts of the state like Catron Co. or McKinley Co.). Much of the eastern part of the state, along the Texas border, is heavily Anglicized and essentially indistinguishable from West Texas, other than by what sports teams people root for.
Charles M. Carrillo [6] (artist, known as Charlie, but not to be confused with New York fiction author Charlie Carrillo) wrote various papers in the course of graduate and maybe post graduate work that dealt with the Hispanic culture in the north of the state and in So. CO, and his three books are on this topic, but none of the books are language-focused. New Mexico Historical Review is a likely journal source for something useful. As I said in previous discussions, anyone actually at UNM or nearby, has a whole bunch of paper sources at their disposal at the UNM library that would be hard to find otherwise.
 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  10:00, 22 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish: I just realized I've never replied to or acknowledged the vast descriptions you gave above about different varieties of English throughout the state. Thank you. I like your colloquial observations still detailed enough to be legitimately intriguing on a linguistic level; it seems like there is a potential for a ton of dialect research in New Mexico.
On another note, I was, at some point, thinking of possibly starting a "Southwestern American English" page and potentially merging "English of New Mexico" there, since overall the state seems to have more commonalities with the region at large than earthshattering distinctions. Any thoughts there? Wolfdog (talk) 15:39, 5 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Wolfdog: Guess it's a matter of a) whether the the dialects that would comprise SWAmEng have enough in common that sources consistently treat them as a dialect continuum, and b) whether they don't have enough that distinguishes at least some of them that they warrant their own articles anyway. It's not an either–or, and most of our linguistics articles overlap, in that there's a family article that mentions how languages in it relate and differ, then an article on each language that covers its dialects, then articles on the dialects or groups of dialects, and if the latter sometimes specific articles on the dialect within the group; just on the Germanic alone, there's a big forest of this, which is thick even if you start in toward a branch end, e.g. Dutch language.

But this is no longer strictly a linguistics article, but also a cultural history one, as a result of discussions above and changes made pursuant to them. I would hazard a guess that WP:WikiProject New Mexico would object to merging this article away. I've agreed with you for some time that the current page isn't very good, and have seen that researching it further will be difficult and require physically going to a library like that at UNM that has the needed materials on paper, as well as access to electronic journals I don't have. But the article has improved. I think the project would make a WP:GNG argument to keep it separate, and probably succeed.

That said, if linguists are addressing the vernacular English of West Texas(?) through California(?) as a "Southwestern American English" dialect continuum, we should have an article on it regardless whether the present article remains. I've spent the day looking into that, and the results are not encouraging, though the time was fruitfully spent. What I'm mostly seeing is 1) Western American English (i.e. from roughly NM, CO, WY, MT westward) treated as a generalized dialect continuum or region, and poorly-studied (compared to more easterly US dialects, both north an south); 2) the Southwest being treated as a region culturally and historically. These are somewhat conflicting approaches, taken by 1) by linguists and almost exclusively phonologists, versus 2) by sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and applied sociolinguistics and language pedagogy specialists, respectively. I'm polishing up a search for sources; will post it in a bit. Without more direct access to full text and better journal searches (I'm "between access" right now) it's no less difficult to ascertain that linguists define any such thing as "Southwestern American English" consistently than that they do so for "New Mexican English" (if anything, the latter is more likely because it's a more discrete topic, while the former requires a demonstrating an actual dialect continuum that may not exist with clear Southwestern boundaries).

In short, I think the present approach of English in New Mexico as a culturo-historical topic, that also includes relevant linguistic information when available, is easier to source and more cohesive for readers. That said, I don't think that an article on English in the American Southwest is impossible (nor one on Spanish in the region, with information on how they have rubbed together).
PS: Yeah, there is a ton of dialect research that could be done there. If I felt like giving up tech and going back into linguistics, I would probably do my masters and doctoral work on that, since it would be comparatively easy (versus, say, studying the intergrading of some Papua New Guinean languages or whatever), should get done, would be fundable, and would probably be well-received by a lot of people, plus I already have some potential "introducers" like the aforementioned Carrillo).
 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  11:56, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish: I guess I was more in line with the idea of making a "Southwestern American English" describing several relatively heterogeneous dialects (partly comprising the merged "English in New Mexico"), as opposed to assuming the term refers to a uniform regional dialect. This is much the way "English of New Mexico" or "New England English" reads right now; they talk as much (or more) about internal differences within their region than unifying similarities, but they allow an article that details various varieties without having a bunch of standalone works like this one, with its not-so-good, only-moderately-convincing and -executed research. Atlas of North American English speaks of a "Southwestern" dialect region a few times, though the only really clarified delineation is the area's Midland-like glide deletion in prize: "there is some glide deletion before resonants for at least one speaker in each of three southwestern cities: Tucson, Phoenix, and Los Angeles." Sounds like your unencouraging search gives me no further reason to be gung-ho about a new page on English varieties of the Southwestern United States. Thanks for looking into it. Wolfdog (talk) 00:20, 7 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Results of a new source-discovery run[edit]

I did a bunch of digging for sources, on:

  1. NM English, Spanish and their contact
  2. Sociology, sociolinguistics, education policy, and subculture of Latino English and bilingualism (mostly not constrainable to NM, but often to the SW)
  3. The Spanish of the area (again often of the SW in general, not just NM)
  4. Historical and cultural background material that may relate, e.g. as to Native American English usage in the area, development of Southern and Southwestern English, cultural events in NM and the SW that affected Hispanic versus Euro-American population and affluence, etc.

It's not comprehensive, being the cream of about 8 pages of Google Scholar results, and a bunch of looking around on Amazon, plus some follow-the-rabbit digging. But it's quite a lot of material that, even if not usable at this article, should be at related ones, including perhaps an article on "Southwestern American English" or "English in the American Southwest".

  • Notes
    • Most of these are behind paywalls. I may have missed some full-text download links among them, and I did not try alternative searches for individual papers to see if they're available in full text at other sites. This was a "fast" (8.5 hour) search-examine-cite dump (from combing the results of a Google Scholar search on Southwest American English).
    • Search results for Southwestern English generally produce results relating to southwestern England.
    • I formatted them as WP:CS1 citations for easy re-use.

The sources:

  • On dialectology in the region or in the US broadly:
Extended content
  • Underwood, Gary N. (January 1974). "American English Dialectology: Alternative for the Southwest". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 1974 (2): 19–40. doi:10.1515/ijsl.1974.2.19. (Abstract only, at this URL.)
  • Kurath, Hans (May 1928). "The Origin of the Dialectal Differences in Spoken American English". Modern Philology. 25 (4): 385–395. doi:10.1086/387724. (First page only, at this URL.)
  • Suci, G. J. (July 1960). "A comparison of semantic structures in American Southwest culture groups". The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 61 (1): 25–30. doi:10.1037/h0047110. (Abstract only, at this URL.)
  • Kretzschmar, William A., Jr. (2004). "Regional Dialects". In Finegan, Edward; Rickford, John R. (eds.). Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 39–57. ASIN B00E3URECA. ISBN 9780521777476.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) (Snippet view, at the URL; much of the article is available, including key diagrams and the bibliography.)
    • Noteworthy for a systematic classification (which may be more relevant for the article on AmEng as a whole) of AmEng urban dialect areas into the following groups and subgroups (as of 1997), mostly running in wide lateral bands across the country (see diagram on p. 54): North (North Central [covering WI, MI, n. IA, ND, and n. SD], Inland North [most of the Great Lakes cities, and the locus of an ongoing "Northern Cities Vowel Shift"; also incl. w. NY state, MI], Boston and Eastern New England [incl. NYC as sub-sub-dialect, NJ, CT, etc.]); Midland (North Midland [incl. Pittsburgh and St. Louis as sub-sub-dialects, and also covering PA, n. OH, n. IN, n. IL, s. IA, NE, n. KS, s. SD], South Midland [Philadelphia as sub-sub-dialect, plus DC, n. MD, DE, far n. WV, s. OH, s. IN, s. IL, n. MI, s. KS, n. OK, far n. TX panhandle]) South (Coastal Southeast [isolated pocket from Charleston NC to Savannah GA] and South proper, locus of an ongoing "Southern Vowel Shift" [incl. everything from s. MD down to FL, and west to almost all of TX, s. OK, and far se. NM]; and an undifferentiated West (the far sw. spur of TX, almost all of NM, far sw. ND, far w. SD, far w. NE, CO, WY, MT, AZ, UT, NV, ID, CA, OR, WA).
    • This is interesting because a) it will not perfectly align with overall dialect maps, based as much on rural speakers as urban ones, and Kretzschmar purports to show a different pattern based on rapid urban migration rather than slow agricultural-community dispersal (which makes sense; these really were different migrations of different people from diff. places and in diff. concentrations to diff. new locales); and b) it belies a lack of western US dialect research, because there is clearly a huge difference between the speech patterns of people in c. to n. NM, s. CA, n. CA through WA, and inland in places like ID-UT-WY-MT, including in urban centers in these areas. Kretzschmar's paper focuses on the East Coast and n. vs. s. differences. Fortunately, CA dialects in particular have been the subject of a lot of study, so at least those could be teased out of his "the West" mess.
    • Kretzschmar's work (as far as it went) seems to be based on data from the American Linguistic Atlas Project (https://www.us.english.uga.edu) and Atlas or North American English (see below).
    • Kretzschmar also provides a "Suggestions for further reading and exploration" section (p. 56) before his bibliography proper.
    • I'm adding this Language in the USA book to my "get" list, for some other articles in it, but it's not a high priority (I'm loath to spend $30+ on a 2004 textbook).
    • The previous edition (1981, ISBN 9780521298346, with very little overlappign content) doesn't appear to have anything specific enough to be useful here. The article "New World Spanish" by Jerry R. Craddock sounds far too general, and I don't know about the content of "Varieties of American English" by Walt Wolfram; "Profile of a state: Montana" by Anthony F. Beltramo might be useful for an overall article on Western American English, but is no help for SW stuff.
  • Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (2005). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110167467.. This is something to get via interlibrary loan; the retail price is over US$1000. Provides a lot of details on broad regional patterns (the Inland North or just the North, New England, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midland, West, and Canada; plus several major cities as sub-sub-dialects. Contrasts multiple systems of analysis. As with most such works, it focuses heavily on differences between n. and s., and has much less detailed material on w. dialects. Associated website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas
  • Wolfram, Walt; Schilling, Natalie (2015). American English: Dialects and Variation. "Language in Society" series (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1118390221.
  • Amberg, Julie S.; Vause, Deborah J. (2009). American English: History, Structure, and Usage. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521617888.. Seems to be primarily an ESL textbook, but might have something useful.
  • Spanish–English contact, code switching, and creolization:
Extended content
  • Timm, L. A. (May 1, 1975). "Spanish–English Code Switching: El Porqué y How-Not-To". Romance Philology. 28 (4). University of California, Berkeley: 473–482.
  • Finegan, Edward (2004). "American English and its distinctiveness". In Finegan, Edward; Rickford, John R. (eds.). Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 27–28. ASIN B00E3URECA. ISBN 9780521777476. (Snippet view, at the URL; the quoted part below is available, while the bibliography is not.) Quote from "Across ethnic groups" section, p. 27: "On English-language radio and television broadcasts, correspondents generally speak without marked social group accents .... Latino correspondents typically do not exhibit dialect markers in the body of their reports, but some use a marked ethnic pronunciation of their own names when they sign off .... Likewise, news reports delivered by Latino correspondents often display characteristic pronunciations of Latino names ..." [eye-dialect examples elided]. That's the only relevant part of the chapter, and is not confined to the Southwest, but presumably would also refer, in the aggregate, to Latino reporters in Florida, New York, etc.
    • "For a book-length treatment of Chicano English, see Fought 2003." (From Finegan; the biblio. details are not visible in the snippet view.)
  • Lipski, John M. (1999) [1993]. Roca, Ana; Lipski, John M. (eds.). "Creoloid phenomena in the Spanish of transitional bilinguals". Spanish in the United States: Linguistic Contact and Diversity. Mouton de Gruyter/Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110165722. (Snippet view only, at this URL, with only portions of the article available, including only about 1/10th or less of its substantial bibliography.)
    • Some other articles in this book are probably also relevant, e.g. "Convergent conceptualizations as predictors of degree of contact in U.S. Spanish" by Ricardo Otheguy and Ofelia Garcia
  • Roca, Ana; Jensen, John B., eds. (1996). Spanish in Contact: Issues in Bilingualism. Cascadilla Press. ISBN 9781574730081. Has section on contact of Spanish with other languages (mostly English) in the US; other sections cover Spain and Latin America.
  • One in the other direction, and worth a look, since assimilation (and often mis-assimilation) of Spanicisms is a common feature of SW AmEng, yet in the face of stubborn monolingualism on the part of most whites in the regions. Hill, Jane H. (1993). "Hasta la Vista, Baby: Anglo Spanish in the American Southwest" (PDF). Critique of Anthropology. 13 (2). SAGE: 146–176. (Full text at URL.)
    • Also distinguishes multiple period of Spanish–English crosspolination in the region (cowboy era of workaday word exchange in the mid-1800s; the beginnings of affluent white migration and tourism to the area, starting in the 1880s in California; and a modern exchange rooted popular culture, especially "jocularity, irony and parody".
    • Has a useful bibliography.
  • On the Spanish of the region (and its influence on the local English or vice versa):
Extended content
  • Bentley, H. W. (1932). A dictionary of Spanish terms in English: With special reference to the American Southwest. Columbia University Press.
  • Willis, Erik W. (2005). "An initial examination of Southwest Spanish vowels". Southwest Journal of Linguistics. 24 (1–2): 185 ff. (Abstract only, at this URL. Says it includes a literature review, and also accounts for contact between Spanish and indigenous languages, and natural conversation, while previous work on this focused on the Spanish of the Iberian peninsula and on "laboratory" speech samples. The abstract suggests that the study reaches conclusions that differ from the older work, but buries this lede.)
  • Zentella, Ana Celia (2004). "Spanish in the Northeast". In Finegan, Edward; Rickford, John R. (eds.). Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 182–204. ASIN B00E3URECA. ISBN 9780521777476. (Snippet view only, at this URL. Most of the article is missing, but its bibliography is present). In full text, could presumably help distinguish Spanish>English influence in the Southwest (mainly Mexican, but some Colonial in NM) versus that in the Northeast (mainly Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Central and South American).
  • Keep in mind the unique history of northern New Mexico Spanish, which was more isolated between colonial times and the era of broadcasting, and remains distinct to an extent.
  • Sheridan, Thomas (1986). Los Tucsonenses. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Covers an unusual situation of middle-class Hispanic, Spanish-speaking affluence in Tucson, Arizona in the 19th century, while Hispanics were subjected to racism and subordination in Texas and California. It did not last, and by the early 20th century, the local culture of the area had been overturned by the same kind of anti-"Mexican" prejudice by increasing numbers of Euro-Am. settlers.
  • Saunders, Lyle (1949). The Spanish-speaking Population of Texas. University of Texas Press.
  • Relationships of bilingualism, English fluency, and accented speech to education, medical care, etc., in the region:
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  • Native American connections:
Extended content
  • Leap, William L. (1993). American Indian English. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ISBN 978-0-87480-639-7. (Snippet view only, at this URL; while many pages are missing, the available material is substantial. Appears to especially focus on the Ute and their reservation schools, as a case study, in later chapters. Earlier chapters are more generalized. The index indicates coverage of many Southwest groups, including Mohave, Navajo, Puebloan, etc., through to the Lakota and Apache, as well as influence of Black English Vernacular.)
  • Anderson, Eric Gary (1999). American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0292704886. (Only snippet view available, at that URL but provides some entire chapters, including the one mentioned below.)
    • Has a chapter "Indian Detours, or, Where the Indians Aren't: Management and Preservation in the Euro-American Southwest" that may be relevant, as might some of the other material in here. Also has material on "assimilationists" among these peoples (e.g. Jason Benitez), and their writings.
    • Worth quoting: "read writers such as Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather" (i.e., Euro-Americans writing about the Southwest) "in Indian contexts for the simple but often overlooked reason that the Southwest is first and foremost Indian country." Large tracts of the Southwest, especially west of Texas, remain Native American land.
    • Also covers Euro-American expansionism into the area and its consequences more broadly. While presenting the context and viewpoints of the indigenous inhabitants, it also contains some academic analysis, with citations (including to critiques of early but still-common assumptions).
  • There are also various works available on the "Indian school" movement and its imposition on (along with English and an anti-indigenous-language approach) at and near reservations all throughout the Southwest. (You'll find an Indian School Road or the like in most cities in the area (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Scottsdale, etc.), that used to lead to the isolated schools in question, but today are often lined with shops and suburban housing tracts.)
  • Brandt, Elizabeth A. (July 1981). "Native American Attitudes toward Literacy and Recording in the Southwest". Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest. 4 (2): 185–195. (Only abstract available, at this URL.)
  • Connections between African American Vernacular English, a.k.a. Black English Vernacular, and general Southern dialects (which definitely includes Texan and Oklahoman but probably not New Mexican through Californian except to a minor extent, until the rise of hip hop subculture in the 1980s):
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  • Cukor-Avila, Patricia (October 10, 2001). "Co-existing grammars: The relationship between the evolution of African American and White Vernacular English in the South". In Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.). Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 93–127. ISBN 978-9027297983. (Snippet view only, at this URL, but substantial portions, including long bibliography.)
  • Bailey, Guy (October 10, 2001). "The relationship between African American and White Vernaculars in the American South: A sociocultural history and some phonological evidence". In Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.). Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 53–92. ISBN 978-9027297983. (Snippet view only, at this URL, with most of the article unavailable including most of the bibliography.)
  • Those are the only two articles in Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English that appear potentially relevant.
  • See also Leap, American Indian English, above.
  • Historical and cross-cultural background:
Extended content
  • Weber, David J. (1982). Billington, Ray Allen; Lamar, Howard R. (eds.). The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico. "Histories of the American Frontier" series. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0-8263-0603-9. (Only snippet view, at this URL.) At least chapters 7–11 are likely to be relevant, on Euro-American settlement and economics.
    • Important dates, of first Spanish colonial permanent settlements in what it regarded as the Far North and what is now the US Southwest: 1598 (NM), 1700 (AZ), 1716 (TX), 1769 (CA, "Alta California"). P. xvi.
    • Quotes from intro: (pp. xv–xvi, xviii): "Some three centuries of Spanish activity in this region has tended to overshadow the brief period of Mexican rule [1821, losing land steadily until 1854]. So too has a century and a quarter [as of that writing] of American sovereignty .... Lost between the Spanish and American periods, the Mexican interlude has become something of a dark age in the historiography of the Southwest .... In general, neither Mexican nor American historians have sharply illuminated the era. ... United States historians ... have ethnocentrically shoved theor own countrymen to the front of the stage .... [T]urbulence and change characterized the quarter century of Mexican sovereignty over what is today the American Southwest." There's a lot else of interest even just in the intro (e.g. these areas lay largely outside New Spain's defenses and were considered far-flung frontiers; the original 1814 plan for Mexican independence from Spain excluded these lands from the forthcoming America mexicana).
    • There's also a suggestion that, after inclusion in the later, successful Mexican Revolution as important buffer zones between México proper and various rebellious Native American and hostile foreign powers (US and Russia), that the Mexican sovereignty period was the only time before the modern era that the isolation of TX, NM, AZ, and CA from each other was bridged in an organized way (though that was lost against for a while after the Mexican–American War, until the coming of the railroads). During the Spanish period, overland crossing to CA had been cut off by the Yuma since 1781, and there were large tracts between TX and NM and between NM and what is now AZ that were unpopulated except by Indians. The isolation had been greatly exacerbated by Napoleon's invasion of Ibera in 1808, and other Spanish military troubles, cutting off Spanish troops and supplies to outlying areas of New Spain (see pp. 6, 10–11).
  • Major, Mabel; Pearce, T. M. (1972). Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliographies. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. (Only abstract available, at this URL.) 'The book is divided into four parts: "Literature before the Anglo-American, to 1800," ... "Literature of Anglo-American Adventurers and Settlers, 1800–c. 1918," ... ""Literature from c.1918–1948," ... and "Literature from 1948–1970"'
  • Leonard, Olen Earl; Hannon, John J. (1974). Changes in a rural area: Some social and economic effects of outmigration and resource adjustment in the Spanish speaking villages of North Central New Mexico. University of Arizona Press. OCLC 14515568. This may be a dissertation, and is hard to find. The UT-Austin library has it in the Benson Latin American Collection (2 copies, call no. HD 211 N6 L466 1974, possibly borrowable through interlibrary loan). Labor mobility from this area to the cities, especially Santa Fe and Albuquerque, had a major effect on the English of urban central NM (which is almost half Hispanic, and mostly not from Mexican immigration).

 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  12:47, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

New Mexican English[edit]

Sock puppetry, per Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Smile Lee. If there is a valid suggestion here, it should be made by an unblocked editor. Grayfell (talk) 21:03, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Isn’t it the usual thing to call a locality’s English by its demonym? Like shouldn’t this just be called “New Mexican English”, and is there any eveidence that this is multiple varieties of English, and not just a main dialect with sub-varieties. As far as I can tell, these are all referencing the same variety of English. For example, Burqueño English and Northern New Mexican Chicano English seem to just be subtle variants of one another, and don’t the Hispanos of New Mexico speak that Chicano English variety, could this just be a misnomer? For example Scottish English goes by many names, including Glasgow English which would be the equivalent of Burqueño English here, but it’s still just a subtle variant of the same Scottish English. It seems like a huge stretch to also now be including Indiginous and Hispano influences on the New Mexican English language which most sources seem to talk about. Point is, this article is a mess, and it seems someone ripped it apart by destroying relavant resources, there’s a viral video that made the news many times that had this dialect, the actress of which did small teaching sessions on New Mexican English at UNM and professors there have done talks on it, and that “Heaven Sent Gaming” source mentioned above for example is referenced in the Albuquerque Journal and other local news resources, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be used. And there is no logic in assuming that New Mexico has more than one main variety, and as such I think the name “New Mexican English” works much better here. Sorry just a rant from an angry Sandia Pueblo man, that is all. 2600:1:D517:7DCA:F079:FFCB:6231:1F2D (talk) 20:50, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Uh huh. Heaven Sent Gaming is absolutely not a reliable source. It was a pernicious source of vanity spam, and should not be cited here, per many tedious time-sinking discussions on multiple Wikipedia talk pages. Last I checked, that website itself specifically requested that it not be cited on Wikipedia, which is pretty funny, since evidence pointed to the site's owner being the one who was adding most of the citations. If you know of reliable sources which have a reputation for accuracy and fact checking, please present them.
This article's lede specifically explains that it's about the larger topic of how English is used in New Mexico. If sources do not agree on there being one or multiple varieties, the article will reflect that. If you have a specific proposal to make, please do so. Grayfell (talk) 21:14, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You are right, I don’t know much about reliable sources or pernicious sources or citations. Thank you for the link. I’ll try though. The sources that the prior topic person SMcCandlish posted do agree in a singular New Mexican English, and UNM had a studies that showed the differences and even used the term “New Mexican English” https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ling_etds/49/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367006913516035 UNM’s “What: Engaging the Linguistic Diversity of UNM in the Classroom“ mentions that “New Mexican English is itself unique” As for the “Heaven Sent Gaming” resource I know some reliable sources that talk about them like Albuquerque Journal https://www.abqjournal.com/1047119/admiration.html and KRQE https://www.krqe.com/amp/news/heaven-sent-gaming-celebrates-decade/900391688 they aren’t the only ones, there are others but those are New Mexican ones. From what I know they are not just a site and they are an organization that is owned by more than one individual, but I didn’t know they didn’t want to be cited, if you were fighting spam they may have been doing the same from this website and placed a warning to fight that spam too. They have contact information on their site, were they ever helped or contacted about that? I don’t know, it sounds like too much of an assumption to think they added citations if they were not allowing there inclusion. Onto the other resource that I mentioned a viral video that is discussed by KOAT https://www.koat.com/amp/article/burquenos-video-goes-viral/5039276 and Colores on PBS https://www.newmexicopbs.org/productions/colores/september-20-2013/ I hope these help if they don’t then that’s fine then. I don’t want to bother, which it seems like I did, sorry about that 2600:1:D517:7DCA:F079:FFCB:6231:1F2D (talk) 23:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The only reason Heaven Sent Gaming hasn't been added to the spam blacklist is because it's not worth the hassle. Well, it's not worth it weighed against how amusing these attempts to defend it are. "it sounds like too much of an assumption"... It isn't. The site's founder has been proven to have started many, many sock puppet accounts, and this editor has a long history of wasting people's time by pretending to be a gee-whiz innocent bystander who just happened to stumble on this issue, and ask "golly, why, exactly isn't it reliable?" This isn't an assumption, this is a demonstrated pattern. That editor, should he happen to read this, would have to log into his original account and request an unblock, which would, just as a starting point, require disclosing every sock account he had made. I seriously doubt this would be enough, however, but it would be a start. Even then, the site itself would still not have a positive reputation for accuracy and fact checking, so it would still not be usable on Wikipedia. Local softball blurbs, only one of which even mentions the lexicon, are not sufficient to counteract the site's reputation for deception and sloppy scholarship demonstrated by this past behavior. Grayfell (talk) 01:22, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That was rude, wtf. You didn’t even address my information regarding the viral video or the other resources from UNM. I don’t know what you’re talking about with Heaven Sent Gaming and I don’t care, you should contact them if there is a spam issue though. Get back on topic, I was talking about New Mexican English . . . but at this point I don’t care enough. Out 2600:1:D509:5422:186B:8098:7190:11AB (talk) 04:03, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you haven't already, see the section "Requested move 24 October 2015" above. Also, look here for more on the Heaven Sent Gaming scandal. Wolfdog (talk) 21:29, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I'm not sure that any one variety has been identified, as you advocate. Can you tell us about it (and the sources that back it)? A majority of white New Mexicans presumably speak Western American English, with minor characteristics here or there that give it local flavor. A sizeable portion of Latino New Mexicans speak dialects of Chicano English. So where's the "one" New Mexican dialect? Wolfdog (talk) 21:38, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That Heaven Sent Gaming issue sounds like a gigantic misunderstanding, and it should be worked out with them, sounds like both sites were dealing with spam. “Local softball blurb” by Aaron Drawhorn? If I remember correctly he covered news for Las Vegas Review-Journal during the OJ Simpson fiasco, I’m pretty sure he’s more qualified than you are to assess them than us. Heaven Sent Gaming is most certainly not spam, and they have many contact methods all over their site, contact them and work it out. I don’t care enough to do so, but you people seem more than interested and capable to do so. Back to the topic at hand, I wouldn’t presume a difference between Anglo and Latino communities in a regional variation. While I agree that the most certainly is a Hispano influenced Northern anew Mexico English, I don’t think it would be broadly called Chicano. Back to the research, UNM did research on accents between monolingual and multilingual New Mexican English speakers, and found there was only a very slight difference between the onset of any accent, and many scholarly studies base their on a “New Mexican English” in particular. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ling_etds/49/ https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_7QYBwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA238&dq=%E2%80%9CNew+Mexican+English%E2%80%9D&ots=yxEl80sgVG&sig=_ortxoCCe2gjswbJaAzV_HqhQlg http://search.proquest.com/openview/447664de0138259b81288bbb03433362/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y https://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-abstract/102/1/31/133497 2600Texan (talk) 03:09, 17 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

For WP:AGF, I searched JSTOR to see what came up. The only use of the exact phrase "New Mexican English" is this from 1975. This term isn't directly used, but is part of the title of a Ph. D dissertation from 1941 ("Characteristic Features of New Mexican English between 1905 and 1890" by Woodford A. Heflin, University of Chicago). This was already mentioned on this talk page a few years ago, and I agree that it's extremely thin. Comically thin, really. (There is also one other search match, but it's a false positive). This search proves nothing, but it does suggest that this isn't a special term with an established usage. When in doubt, common usage matters, per Wikipedia:Article titles. "New Mexican English" doesn't appear to be that common.
Perhaps this is the FUTON bias, though, and "new" and "english" are ubiquitous enough to make search tedious. Still...
These links 2600Texan provides are useless for this. The dissertation is unfinished, unpublished, and cannot be verified. The Google Book result doesn't use the phrase, it just has some pages with those three words on them. The proquest article is so completely unrelated that it's either an error or outright trolling. The Duke Press link is at least relevant, but if it supports a name change, I don't get how. New Mexican Spanish has a documented (and interesting) history, but this article isn't about that, and we should avoid false equivalence.
From this, and looking through some of the results I found, I endorse the move from 2015. As was said at the time, this change alleviates confusion. That's good enough. Grayfell (talk) 05:29, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I’ll repeat and continue some of what I said on my talk page here with more added. Even if there was consensus beforehand for moving away from New Mexican English, I brought up completely other academic and scholarly sources that reliably show the term New Mexican English, and even make simple conclusions about a regional New Mexican English. Quotes “New Mexican Spanish, predicate nominals designating occupations or social status favor bare nouns, but in New Mexican English, the direction of effect is reversed” and “ ” and “dialectology and sociolinguistics have largely ignored the topic of New Mexican English, perhaps in part because English is still a relative newcomer to the region.” The viral video “Shit Burqueños (New Mexicans) Say” has also been continually ignored in these discussions, I bring it up because as I’ll repeat the person Lauren Poole who acted in them did an interview with PBS https://video.klru.tv/video/colores-colores-september-20th-2013/ and did New Mexican English for a lecture at UNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzhMLDvdrkQ. Common usage does matter, “New Mexican English” is much more documented than the overly confusing and meaninglessness “English in New Mexico”, I feel like it implies that English is a secondary language in New Mexico which it is not, and this can be shown in the higher popularity of this page back when it was “New Mexican English”. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2014-07-01&end=2019-03-17&pages=New_Mexican_English%7CEnglish_in_New_Mexico 2600Texan (talk) 09:51, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Well, I was planning to ignore what you've said on your talk page with its personal insults and fabrications, but since you bring it up, here's some of the things you said: that I'm being "very hostile", "slandering", "jumping to like a million conclusions", "talking down" to you, and "mocking" you. What in the world are you referring to? This isn't how people edit in a collaborative way. Let's move on....
  • From which exact source are these "Quotes" you give?
  • Why are you saying the Burqueños video is being ignored, and, even if that's true, why should it matter? I think it actually used to be sourced right here on the page until some editor (it looks like Savidinaz -- feel free to talk to him/her) removed it. To be fair, it's not an academic source; it's a comedy video. The fact that a comedy video has gone viral and therefore been covered by local news outlets adds nothing to your advocacy for the term "New Mexican English." Neither video even uses that term! Tell me what I'm missing. Wolfdog (talk) 20:48, 19 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This is more of what I expected when I signed on here, I’d been editing anonymously for a long while. So when I created an account, after being involved in an issue which blocked Sprint IPs in Texas, I expected to have more of a collaborative experience.

Wolfdog did not say those things, I did.
It is severely undermining your argument constantly focus on Heaven Sent Gaming. This isn't the place to defend them as a source, and citing additional sources which have nothing at all to do with their reliability wouldn't be the way to do it. This is especially peculiar on a talk page for an article that has nothing to with this company. Repeatedly asking us to contact them, as though it were our obligation to do that, and as though they didn't have several years to 'work it out' before, is also undermining your argument.
Regardless, this is all over the place. Which KRQE video show the main actress? KRQE is a local news channel for Albuquerque, that's how affiliate stations work. So is KOAT. What is the actual proposal, here?
If your proposal is to change the article name back to what Smile Lee had it as, I haven't seen a coherent argument for why that would happen. You do not have consensus, which is what would be needed. If your proposal is something else, explain it in direct language. Grayfell (talk) 20:28, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I realize Wolfdog said this, you have been working hard to steer this discussion back to a more level-headed position. I appreciate that, and I’m sorry you received crossfire over it, let’s try to keep this on a level where we can create consensus. The KRQE source was mentioned on my talk page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzhMLDvdrkQ. KRQE and KOAT are news for Albuquerque, yes, but it is a major news source for television news in New Mexico being broadcast statewide in Santa Fe, Roswell, and even in Durango, Colorado. KRQE, KOAT, and Albuquerque Journal are widely distributed mainstream news sources. I haven’t focused on Heaven Sent Gaming, it was small mention in my first post. I became wrongly accused, and defended my position, as well as gave my opinion of the accusations, they should be contacted to prevent these accusations from happening again. Because they should be allowed to clear their name otherwise at this point it seems to be a very one-sided argument. I don’t care if it was the Queen of England who called it “New Mexican English” I do care that it is the most commonly referenced terminology, as I’ve shown in numerous academic and scholarly sources. It even lends conformality to New Mexican Spanish. “English in New Mexico” isn’t too specific enough, as it could just be talking about a British accent speaking person speaking English in New Mexico. “New Mexican English” is more concise in referencing this Demonym’s usage of the Language, in this case demonym language would be New Mexican English. 2600Texan (talk) 21:20, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What? Who are you responding to? I, Grayfell said this was a waste of time and that the overwhelming majority of those who have defended Heaven Sent Gaming have turned out to be Smile Lee's sock puppets. Both of those things are still true. It was not Wolfdog.
As I already said, and as Smile Lee certainly already knows by now, he would have to log into his original account and deal with this there. He has already been blocked for his disruptive behavior, and this behavior continued for several months after that (at a minimum). The burden is now on him to appeal.
So far you have failed to gain consensus for changing the article. You have not addressed the reasons it was changed in the first place. We do not assume that readers are foolish enough to think an entire article would be about a British person speaking English in New Mexico. There is no ambiguity here, except the ambiguity of our sources.
The excessively lengthy Google Books link includes your search terms. You specifically searched for the phrase "New Mexican English", which means you are not searching for sources on the topic, you are searching for sources which support your preferred phrasing. This is a fundamentally flawed approach. Throwing a bowl of search spaghetti against the wall might make a big splash, but it isn't good scholarship. Grayfell (talk) 21:54, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Remember, try to be constructive and collaborative. If I’m being asked to do this, you must do the same.

  • I was broadly responding, in an attempt to be respectful. Specific blame was not intended.
  • Heaven Sent Gaming is notable, as in covered in-depth in several independent local, nationwide and international publications. Whether Smile Lee knows how to fix the issue isn’t even the point here, you’re assuming that account was the main culprit, from what I can tell that account was extremely constructive before it was accused. Regardless of those facts the point is to get the other side of the story, by reaching out to them which should done, rather than relying on your bias. Ignoring these facts shows a fundamentally flawed approach.
  • I used way more than a Google Books link, and you know it. You’re talking down my research by saying I’m throwing a bowl of speghetti. I have given several examples of New Mexican English (New Mexico) and Burqueño English (Albuquerque, New Mexico) being used and how they are ised interchangably as a Demonym Language reference, and the Demonym Language were talking about here is New Mexican English. You have an obvious bias, to keep this article titled in the vague manner, so you toss out anything that disagrees with you. I also tried to look for “English in New Mexico” and this term is only used, to describe English language usage in New Mexico, it’s not used to describe English from New Mexico, eg Spanish and English in New Mexico. By relying on your bias alone, that isn’t good scholarship. 2600Texan (talk) 23:03, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciations[edit]

Kbb2: You're not providing any sources for your pronunciations that would override mine, so why don't we just agree to use phonemic transcriptions on this page? That would simplify our editing disagreements. (I also don't understand why you're opposed to narrow transcriptions for exact dialects but that's another matter.) Wolfdog (talk) 17:11, 12 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • @Kbb2:: Hi... again I ask you to respond to me here please. Let's come to some agreement please. Wolfdog (talk) 19:47, 16 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Wolfdog: Sorry, WP failed to ping me the last time (maybe you should use the ping template instead of the u(ser) one, it seems to be more reliable). This is the first time I'm seeing this.
The reason I don't like the transcriptions ˈmäːkinä] and [ˈɒmbɚːz] is because they're inconsistent, strange and probably not entirely correct. First of all, the length marks: the length of the stressed open central vowel in máquina is already conveyed by the stress mark, and we don't use the length mark in IPA transcriptions of NAE on Wikipedia. The length mark in ombers is almost certainly wrong, and so seems to be the initial vowel (are we really to believe that this dialect differentiates LOT from PALM)? This is why I reverted you: because you reinstated wrong transcriptions. When it comes to the centralization diacritic on a, it's almost certainly not needed. As I've already said, General American /ɑ/ varies from back to central and so the symbol ɑ already covers the open central area in NAE dialectology (and English dialectology in general).
The idea of using the IPAc-en template is equally bad. Help:IPA/English is meant to be of help to laymen, but this can't be done at the cost of inaccurate or inconsistent transcriptions here or on any other dialect page. As we've already discussed, /ɪə, ʊə, ɛə/ do not exist in rhotic dialects. They're simply /i/, /u/ and /eɪ/ (or /e/ - same thing written differently) followed by /r/. Furthermore, using the IPAc-en template forces us to use the length mark, even though length isn't phonemic in any or almost any dialect of NAE. This can also create inconsistencies - transcriptions enclosed within IPAc-en use the length mark, and those that aren't don't. This is a perversion, if I may use that word - if anything, phonemic transcriptions should be the ones not to use the length mark, and it should be reserved for the narrowest kind of phonetic transcriptions.
Also, using IPAc-en template forces us to differentiate between /ɒ/ and /ɑː/, a difference that's alien to most varieties of NAE and almost certainly this one. It also forces us to differentiate between /iː/ and /uː/ on one hand and the unstressed-only /i/ and /u/ on the other (which aren't real phonemes by the way), which is a false distinction. What's worse - the usual North American transcription of these vowels is /i, u/ (like the unstressed vowels on Help:IPA/English), not /iː, uː/!
If you have suggestions on how to improve the current transcriptions in the article, I'm all ears. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 20:58, 16 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Kbb2: I'm a little confused as to what gives you the authority over me to determine what's inconsistent, strange and probably not entirely correct when neither of us is using any sources to back up our opinions. I've come to these pronunciations by listening to New Mexicans on YouTube; you don't even offer where your pronunciations come from. (This, for example, is where my length marks come from, with prosodic elements being a very unique part of New Mexican English, it seems.)
Contrary to your assumptions, it's not rare to find speakers who merge LOT-PALM-PALM using a rounded /ɑ/: in other words: [ɒ]. It certainly happens among some of the New Mexicans I've heard. In any case, the Wikipedia diaphoneme /ɒ/ still covers that; so not sure of what the big problem is there. And your idea of symbols "covering" certain larger phonetic areas/spaces does not preclude the fact that there can sometimes be a benefit in narrowly transcribing dialects, as I've argued elsewhere.
I happily defer to your rhotic-dialects argument (I admittedly barely understand some of the consensus-decided intricacies of the WP diaphonemic system, even though I'm prepared to defend its basic existence) and I even agree with your phonemic length-mark argument (although "perversion" is a tad dramatic, no? Haha).
Again, I don't entirely understand your minor crusade against using the IPAc-en template on an encyclopedia that is mostly meant for laymen, but we don't need to argue that here. More specifically (and also again), I've offered that we use a phonemic transcription or how about a broad American phonemic transcription, which, in my previous words, would simplify our editing disagreements by at least forcing us into a more universally agreeable format (rather than you and me wrangling over every phonetic detail); it's still not clear to me why you object to this better compromise. For example, why in the world are you insisting on [o] for the assumed New Mexican allophone of [oʊ], when you and I could be pretty content agreeing that the phoneme at play is /oʊ/ (that's what we've consistently used on Wikipedia) and thus just write it as such?? My suggestion: Let's just use a broad American system. Wolfdog (talk) 22:40, 16 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Aspiration in New Mexican English[edit]

Nardog, In response to your revert to remove aspiration from the transcription, saying one of the key characteristics of Chicano English is shorter VOT as in Spanish; see e.g. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.550.1032&rep=rep1&type=pdf, p.69, I appreciate you presenting this source. Interesting. This indirectly contradicts a source I was just reading today, Carmen Fought's "Chicano English" in World Englishes Volume II (edited by Tometro Hopkins). Fought makes an effort to transcribe the dialect very narrowly, including on page 123 writing that together would often be pronounced [tʰugɛðəɹ]. Now that I look more into her work, you can see that she routinely shows aspiration for the normally-aspirated English consonants, like throughout her Chicano English in Context. To add another complication to your argument, it's likely that most Chicano English is actually a "mix" of stress-timed and syllable-timed. To add further complications to your argument, are we talking about Chicano English here? -- or is canales truly a loanword used among a majority of New Mexicans (even Anglo or non-Spanish-speaking ones)? The continuing crappiness of our sources on this page doesn't exactly help us to know. But we can pretty safely expect non-Latino and probably many Latino New Mexicans to aspirate these consonants. It'd be smarter to stick to showing aspiration. (If only there were fuller and more fleshed-out sources on New Mexican English and what exactly it is -- if anything! But I've been criticized in the past for continuing to harp on that.) Wolfdog (talk) 00:03, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fought is apparently going for a very narrow transcription (unreasonably so, if you ask me)—any prevocalic voiceless oral stop is technically aspirated, some more than others, because humans are not robots and it's impossible to start voicing exactly at the same time as the burst. Regardless, I wouldn't—and we shouldn't—transcribe the consonant in that position with aspiration even in GA. stress doesn't determine aspiration is simply false (at least in most major varieties of English), we recently discussed this at Talk:English phonology/Archive 4#Aspiration of English stops.
(If I remember correctly, I think I heard shorter VOT in Chicano English being talked about in this podcast episode, which is why I was like, "No way!", when I saw your edit and summary. I think you'd find that show informative and entertaining for what it's worth.) Nardog (talk) 00:27, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I would definitely be interested in the podcast, thank you! As for your "Aspiration of English stops" discussion, tell me if I'm misreading this, but aren't other users arguing, like me, that aspiration indeed occurs at the beginning of a word AKA word-initially (as in canales) which is different than at the beginning of any old syllable (as in, arguably, upper)? Wolfdog (talk) 08:36, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's just a matter of degree. The VOT before unstressed vowels is indeed longer when word-initial than when word-internal, but it's still shorter than the VOT before stressed vowels. So whether to mark it in a transcription is an arbitrary choice and comes down to considerations like whether the aspiration is significant enough and whether it is pertinent to the context. I don't think we should particularly in this case because speakers with Spanish/syllable-timed influence are likely to render it more like [ka], with a full-vowel quality but with little aspiration, and speakers with GA/stress-timed influence are likely to render it more like [kə], with the vowel reduced, which means little aspiration anyway. The vowel reduction is even more likely to occur when preceded by a word like a preposition.
(Wait, Fought is the guest of that episode! But it seems I wasn't remembering correctly—it was probably some other episode where one of the hosts was talking about shorter VOT. It's a really good episode anyway though; I also recommend the one about language policy in Canada and the one about transgender and non-binary people.) Nardog (talk) 19:03, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Haha! That's funny about Fought. OK, well when I hear an entirely unaspirated /k/, /p/, or /t/ at the beginning of a word, that tends to sound more foreign to me, whereas even an over-aspirated initial /k/, /p/, or /t/ feels unremarkably like English. (I remember I had a native English-speaking friend who would pronounce a word like connnect even as strongly as [kxəˈnɛkt] and most of her other friends didn't notice.) Yeah, I get that it's all a matter of degrees though. Wow, this sounds like a really cool podcast! Wolfdog (talk) 14:35, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yikes at calling one of the theorized dialects a form of Chicano English[edit]

None of these sources corroborate more than a singular dialect of New Mexican English. And by the way, it is massively racist to call Hispano community solely Chicano, especially considering the non-Aztecan indigenous element of that particular group. There is no evidence that the Hispanic community speaks a completely different variety of English. Also, the pageviews for this article didn’t surpass the “New Mexican English” terminology until very recently, meaning that it was and is the preferred term. Looking through the page history, this article has been morphed in a bad way due to POV, by blocking any and all sources that are contrary to select few editors. 2601:8C2:8080:1BC0:286F:3FE:8B00:F772 (talk) 22:11, 18 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a source that New Mexican English has regularly been a more popular term for views on this page. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2015-07-01&end=2020-03-31&pages=New_Mexican_English%7CEnglish_in_New_Mexico 2601:8C2:8080:1BC0:B823:27F5:21FA:8BB3 (talk) 03:30, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A redirect's popularity on Wikipedia still has nothing to do with it. We go by commonality among reliable, independent sources. If you've been "looking through the page history", you've noticed that there is only one editor who's been pushing for this change, he has been blocked for sock puppetry and playing stupid games, and the few sources he has proposed for this particular argument have been very weak. If you have a non-WP:CIRC source for this, propose it. Grayfell (talk) 04:00, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]