Talk:English in New Mexico/Archive 1

Archive 1

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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)

Pronunciation demurer

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)

Yes, it's a shortening, like saying "'cause" instead of "because".  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:11, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Deletion rationale completely ignores key sources

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)

@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)

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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:12, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Overhaul

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

• 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

RfC: Edit warring?

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)

Take a break (like, have yoursalf a green chile chicken sangwidge >;-) What's the nature of the dispute?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:10, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

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.

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. 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.

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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:21, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

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)

@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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:03, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

• 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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:03, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
  • 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)
    • 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)
      • 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)

      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)

    • 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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:20, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

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)

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)

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?

• 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.... • Arch♦Reader 11:46, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• @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)
  • 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)
    • 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 • Arch♦Reader 21:37, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
      • 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)
        • 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. • Arch♦Reader 01:28, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
          • 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)
• 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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:44, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

• 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. • Arch♦Reader 09:16, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:17, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

@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)

Rodrigues also uses "dialect" repeatedly. I too have concurred to keep source-hunting, and have been doing so.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:20, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

• @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. • Arch♦Reader 23:54, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

You're simply not reading carefully, and I'm done wasting time on circular argumentation with you.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:20, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Find sources

• 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. • Arch♦Reader 01:21, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

@ArchReader: So I emailed Prof. Balukas some 12 days ago; no response yet. Wolfdog (talk) 20:06, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:37, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Heaven Sent Gaming and WP expectations

@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)

What's the story?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:29, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Merge with Chicano English?

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)

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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 24 October 2015

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)

---

New Mexican English → English 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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  09:35, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
  • 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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:40, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
    • 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)
      • 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)
        • 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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:07, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
      • (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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:00, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

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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

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)

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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:00, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

@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)

@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 ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:56, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

@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)