The traditional Spanish of Taos, New Mexico: Acoustic, phonetic and phonological analyses

This study analyzes the traditional variety of Spanish spoken in Taos, New Mexico in order to document and better understand this endangered variety of Spanish. The speakers (n=29) who participated in the study are bilingual taoseños. Their spontaneous and elicited speech are analyzed acoustically, phonetically and phonologically. Acoustic measurements are made and analyzed and spectrograms are presented and detailed. The results provide previously unreported quantitative empirical data which reveal the presence of high variability in both the rhotics and the voiceless velar [x] and glottal [h] fricatives of Taos Spanish. The distributions of the realizations in the Spanish of Taos of the consonant cluster /tr/, the segments /r.C/, the English-like retroflex [r], and of the [x] and [h] are quantified. Speakers of Spanish in Taos are found to indeed have both [x] and [h] as realization for /x/ in their phonetic inventory. These allophones which traditionally appear in mutually exclusive dialects appear not only in word-initial position as aspiration of h, but also for the graphemes ge, gi and j