Language and Identity in Gibraltar

2020

highlights some important language issues in Gibraltar and other multilingual communities, such as minority languages, their survival, and the simultaneous preservation of local identity and proficiency in majority languages. Brexit conversations regarding Gibraltar, and to a lesser extent Covid-19 restrictions, may have an effect on language and linguistic sensibilities on the Rock, by either allowing a greater movement of people and languages, or by limiting them. The status of English as one of the EU's official languages may be called into question post-Brexit. Gibraltar's language policy is unlikely to change to a bilingual one if local identity is threatened. It is ultimately an individual choice of whether to preserve bilingualism among family and friends, or to consolidate native monolingualism and the image of Britishness.

Language in Society, 2010

Reviewed by Frank Nuessel As David Levey, professor at the University of Cadiz, Spain, states in his acknowledgments "[t]he following project was conceived in Granada, researched in Gibraltar, developed in Reading and London and completed in Cadiz" (xxi). The study is a micro-sociolinguistic analysis of a tiny segment of the former British Empire. Gibraltar, a British-governed territory since 1704, is small in size (a total of 6 kilometers), and linked to neighboring Spain by a narrow isthmus. Its current population is 28,875. That population consists of Gibraltarians (81.2%), UK British (11.4%) and non-British (7.4%). The main ethnic groups include Jews (600), Indians (350), and Moroccans (1000). The majority of the inhabitants are Catholic. While English is the official language, Spanish is widely spoken. The author points out that most inhabitants of Gibraltar state that the principal language of Gibraltar is Yanito (Llanito), a term for natives of Gibraltar and the local dialect. In a detailed footnote (1-2), Levey offers a listing of the various theories about the etymology of this word, although, its definitive etymon remains to be determined.

2010

Model-building linguistic inquiry into language variation and change began with three seminal works, among several others, which contributed to the birth of a new linguistic paradigm in the late sixties and early seventies of the 20th century: one is Weinreich, Labov and Herzog’s ‘Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change’ (1968), further developed by Labov’s, “Building on Empirical Foundations” (1982), and the other is Labov’s What is a Linguistic Fact? published in 1975. In my view, they all set the foundations for the development of what linguistic historiography now refers to as the Theory of Language Variation and Change, but also for the development of several other linguistic models, probably impressionalistically referred to as functionalist, in the context of which the then outstanding generativist paradigm that identified form and referential meaning gave way to the consideration of the interplay of other types of meanings (social, stylistic) and functions to e...

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2012

This essay explores the ways in which listening exists as a means for the maintenance and operationalization of power in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. On Main Street, a struggle between Spanish ways of practicing space and British ways of representing space is played out in a discourse between the soundscapes of spoken Llanito and British nationalistic parades. Utilizing ethnographic research gathered in 2009, and drawing on practice theory and semiotic approaches, I argue that an examination of how people listen on Main Street makes legible the complex power dynamics between Gibraltarians, Spanish-ness, and the British state.

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Inglesess

The variety of English used in Gibraltar has been in contact with a number of European languages, such as Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Arabic (Moyer, 1998: 216; Suárez-Gómez, 2012: 1746), for more than 300 years. Studies of this variety have traditionally been based on interviews and observation (e.g. Moyer, 1993, 1998; Cal Varela, 1996; Levey, 2008 2015; Weston, 2011, 2013, etc.), and a detailed morphosyntactic description is yet to be published. In this context, the compilation of a reliable Gibraltar corpus using the standards of the International Corpus of English (ICE) will constitute a landmark in the analysis of this lesser known variety of English. In the present paper we describe the ICE project and the current state of the compilation of ICE-GBR. In addition, we present a detailed comparison between the section on press news reports of ICE-GB (standard British English) and ICE-GBR, with the aim of identifying morphosyntactic features that reveal the influence of language c...

Gibraltar, a 30,000 inhabitant British territory situated on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, is home to a community of people with diverse ethnic origins, languages, history, and political affiliations. The recent upsurge in Gibraltarian literature has served as a tool, not only in that it is reflective of a dynamic and multifaceted identity, but it also serves as a vital sociological tool in identity construction on the part of the Gibraltarians themselves; there is an observable push and pull of affiliation not only in Gibraltar's cultural artifacts, but also in its language. This article identifies the ways in which code-switching in M.G. Sanchez' Rock Black represents the Spanish-British conflict, and views language choice as a tool in the construction of group-identity among contemporary Gibraltarians.

ES Review, 2017

From Anthony Burgess's musings during the Second World War to recent scholarly assessments, Gibraltar has been considered a no man's literary land. However, the Rock has produced a steady body of literature written in English throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the present. Apparently situated in the midst of two identitary deficits, Gibraltarian literature occupies a narrative space that is neither British nor Spanish but something else. M. G. Sanchez's novels and memoir situate themselves in this liminal space of multiple cultural traditions and linguistic contamination. The writer anatomizes this space crossed and partitioned by multiple and fluid borders and boundaries. What appears as deficient or lacking from the British and the Spanish points of view, the curse of the periphery, the curse of inhabiting a no man's land, is repossessed in Sanchez's writing in order to flesh out a border culture with very specific linguistic and cultural traits. Resumen: Desde las descripciones de Anthony Burgess durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta las historias de la literatura más recientes, Gibraltar siempre ha aparecido como tierra de nadie desde el punto de vista literario. Sin embargo, la Roca tiene en su haber un corpus literario escrito en inglés desde mediados del siglo XX hasta la actualidad. Aparentemente situada entre dos deficiencias identitarias, la literatura gibraltareña ocupa un espacio literario distintivo que no es británico ni español. Las novelas y el relato autobiográfico de M. G. Sanchez se sitúan en este espacio liminar de múltiples tradiciones y contaminaciones lingüísticas. El escritor disecciona este espacio atravesado por múltiples fronteras y barreras. Lo que en principio

International Journal of Bilingualism, 2020

Aims and objectives:This article analyses English–Spanish code-mixing in Gibraltar. I describe the distribution of clause-peripheral alternation patterns in order to demonstrate that there is a correlation between single age-groups and particular types of bilingual patterns. This is interpreted as a case of fusion.Methodology:By seeking a correlation between age groups and particular instances of bilingual speech, this study adopts an apparent-time perspective. Furthermore, it tries to combine the quantitative methodology adopted in sociolinguistic studies with the theoretical tools of the sociology of language that are involved in the description of linguistic repertoires. This provides an important key for the interpretation of fusion in this scenario.Data and analysis:The study was based on a corpus of nearly 20 h of interviews with bilingual speakers belonging to three age-groups. After identifying three qualitatively different bilingual patterns, which mainly differed in the pr...

Critical Inquiries in Language Studies, 2022

The analysis of a community’s linguistic landscape has proven to be an excellent tool not only in portraying, but also in evaluating and interpreting what languages are used in a single place (and what languages seem to be invisible), what the vitality of any of these languages is, and the relative influence that each linguistic variety within that community has and how it relates to the other varieties in terms of power, visibility and functionality. The presence or absence of a language in the public space conveys a message that directly and indirectly exposes its significance versus its marginality in the community. The present study analyzes languages used in the public space of a neighborhood in Oviedo, the capital city of Asturias in Spain, where Spanish is the majority language and Asturian is the regional language. While Asturian is present in some of the official street signs, stores’ signages only utilize Spanish along with other minority languages such as Arabic. Using a mixed research approach, this article analyzes attitudes and power relations among Spanish, Asturian and other immigrant languages used in the LL of a neighborhood in Oviedo, Asturias, while also revealing public perceptions of language hierarchies and prestige in the area.

2018

This chapter presents the notion of linguistic policies and rights to a language from a sociopolitical and multicultural perspective. Spain becomes a sociolinguistic prototype due to its extensive history of language planning policies and bilingual education. The case of Spain is studied as representative of a legitimate multilingualism with illustrative examples in terms of officiality, vitality, governmental response, social identity, and educational programs. The chapter is divided into five sections, which explain the linguistic landscape of the Peninsula in terms of language contact approaches and introduce recent research in variationist sociolinguistics. It includes diachronic accounts to explain the contemporary panorama where Spanish is in contact with four other languages, including both the origin and trajectory of its contact with non-Indo-European Basque, and its eventual contact with three other Romance varieties: Portuguese, Galician and Catalan. It concludes with an overview of the repercussions of this contact to map modern Spanish and its role in both society and the educational system. All the sections are inter-linked and encompass topics like language choice, variation according to style and identity. The chapter also contains a range of features such as key terms, glossary, further readings, and topics for discussion. The main scope consists of offering an insight into the sociolinguistic reality of languages in contact, urging the reader to reflect upon this situation. Secondly, it covers social aspects of language planning, and the relations between minority and official languages, and how they are represented in legal policies with Spain as an illustrative example. At the same time, it intends to open a dialogue with the reader to underline how the right to a language becomes a socio-cultural need as an extension of human rights.