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> My father speaks this dialect of Spanish... or at least, he used to. We moved to Northern California when I was very little. But, if we had stayed in New Mexico, my cousins don't speak it either. I asked Dad why he didn't teach me. "What would I do? Speak it to myself?"

I have the same reasoning. I speak a language that is not necessary anymore even in the place my parents came from, since the national language and English are what official business is done in.

My grandparents taught me the language, but none of my cousins have a similar grasp of the language. I still speak it with the older generations in my family, but they do not live near me to interact often enough with my kids, so I would effectively be teaching them a language they will have no use for by the time they are adults.

Disclaimer: I only learned about the New Mexico Spanish variant today and my experience is limited to OP's article plus 2 YouTube videos. That being said:

I think that if you want to, you could learn "standard" Spanish and still have an understandable conversation with you family. At least for me (I'm Mexican) the people in those videos were easier to understand compared to the average Cuban Spanish, for example, which is one of hardest variants for me.

And the differences in vocabulary is something you'd have to face regardless of the language variant. For example, I usually call a belt "cinturón" except for martial arts belts which I always call "cinta", but right now I just searched for "cinta negra" images and all the results were black adhesive tapes and black ribbons.

But yeah, doing so would take many years of "talking like a preschooler", there's no escape from that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkEq9OhbbDQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdAGJz4NvAg

> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkEq9OhbbDQ

> [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdAGJz4NvAg

As a native spanish speaker these are completely understandable, I wouldn't even call them a "different form of Spanish". Sure, they occasionally use a word or structure I wouldn't, but it's all very clear. No more different to my ears than variations in the language from country to country.

> average Cuban Spanish, for example, which is one of hardest variants for me

Interesting. Do you have some sample videos of what's difficult? I don't find Cuban Spanish at all different, but I did have a few Cuban friends growing up so perhaps my ear is used to it from that.

As a non-native spanish speaker I find it quite easy to understand, no more difficult than my mexican gf grandfather, and much much easier than spanish people from andalusia.

Some examples:

from Granada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvpHcX2Ksac

from Cadiz (which they really pronounce Ca'i): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRh9OjCW6Y8

I also understood everything. Reminds me of how some people talk in rural parts of Costa Rica.

Sadly all too common even with popular languages. I ask my dad why he never taught me Spanish and he just "didn't really think about it". Such a wasted opportunity for free goods.

I was having a related discussion with my wife about why our nephews weren’t taught Spanish as a first language (we live in Texas, their dad is bilingual). Frankly, having English as your first language gives you a much higher advantage in life in the current zeitgeist. There’s no incentive to learn RandomLanguage first, but there is every incentive to learn English first.

I'm not really sure that's how it ends up working in reality though if you have exposure to English through school or childcare. We taught our kid Chinese first. He's now 2, almost 3, but he's equally good in both languages, maybe a little better in English at this point since he goes to school every day. So by 3 years old he's just as good or better than his peers in English but also is a native speaker in another language. I can see how a parent might think they are putting their kid at a disadvantage by not concentrating on English but language just comes so naturally to these young children.

Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits. I speak both my native language and English at native levels, simply because I learned my language at home and English in school. Only teaching English is really a waste when you live in an English speaking country, as the child will automatically pick up English through school and friends.

>Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits.

More to the point: Speaking multiple languages expands your ability to express and describe everything, which leads to having more variety in your lines of thought. Different languages have different ways of thinking, thus speaking multiple languages nurtures an open mind.

Source: Me, native English and Japanese speaker.

Same. I've immersed in Japanese for 10+ years and lived in the country. I grew up monolingual, and after that experience I felt like my brain "expanded". I think being able to understand concepts that didn't even exist to me before did that.

For example, I remember after finding out what "tsukkomi" and "boke" are in Manzai I started seeing it play itself out in English conversations with my friends. It's kind of weird seeing a concept play out that was there the whole time, but you re-shaped your thinking to observe and categorize it.

> Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits.

Anecdata: I'm a native English speaker but as a little kid I was completely bilingual in French (dad was a USAF officer stationed at a NATO base in rural France; my sisters and I did our first few years of school in the local village schools). I've long had the impression that native fluency in both languages had benefits; it certainly gave me easy A+ grades in high-school and college French classes, but otherwise I couldn't begin to articulate what those benefits might be.

These days my French is pretty rudimentary, but my wife and I like to watch some English-subtitled French TV series on Netflix and Acorn, e.g., Call My Agent, Candice Renoir, and Munch; it's fun to recognize idioms and sometimes not even need the subtitles.

I disagree. I learned Japanese to a fluent level as an adult and it gave me a whole new world of perspective. Knowing how many thousands of hours that took me, it would have been great to get that perk for free.

Besides, my mom speaks only English anyways. I don't know any bilingual kids I grew up with that ended up having a hard time with English.

You can have two first languages. A kid is able to grow up multilingual.

While we probably lost the New Mexican Spanish after the civil war when the family moved to arizona fr nm, I have the same thing going on.

Dad wouldn’t talk to me in Spanish when I was little - I only heard him speaking it when talking to family on the phone.

Add that to the fact that until I was 9 we were away from the family and I don’t have much

At least my grandparents would talk to me in Spanish so what’s in there is all because of them.

And same experience with HS Spanish - they talk funny this doesn’t sound like anything I know.

Really cool story to be a part of. Reminds me of how Creole formed.