Abstract
A Spanish-speaking settlement was established in 1717 in Spanish Texas near its northeastern border with French Louisiana. Some of the descendants of these settlers, known as “Adaeseños”, live in Northwest Louisiana today. This article reveals their history and describes features of their dialect. Some significant findings were the use of the second person plural informal subject pronoun vosotros ‘you’, which is almost non-existent in the Spanish dialects of the New World, and the nasalization of the dental /d/ to [n] in words like ['on.ne] ¿dónde? ‘where?’ The Adaeseño dialect is similar to vestigial and rural varieties of Spanish, and it is dying due to obsolescence and lack of speakers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Dialect Death: The case of Adaeseño Spanish in Northwest Louisiana |
| Publisher | Recovering the U.s. Hispanic Linguistic Heritage: Sociolhistorical Approaches to Spanish in the United States |
| Pages | 191 - 209 (256) |
| ISBN (Print) | 1558855289 |
| State | Published - Nov 30 2008 |