The linguistic frontier Spanish/English in Gibraltar

This chapter presents the bilingual situation of the British overseas territory of Gibraltar

and the structural evolution of its local variety of code-switching across different generations.

We studied code-switching at the community level from a sociolinguistic perspective,

considering Gibraltar as a dynamic space that has undergone many historical and sociopolitical

changes that are directly reflected in linguistic changes across generations. Through the

sociolinguistic analysis of code-switching patterns, we confirmed that different age groups have

preferences for particular types of bilingual patterns.

For the purpose of our analysis, we combined two oral corpora, the FR-Corpus1 (2012)

and the RG-Corpus2 (2020/21), to study generational variation in the local variety of code-

switching in Gibraltar known as Yanito. The combination of the two corpora allowed a better

and deeper comparison of several generations of speakers, making it possible to track linguistic

changes (shifts). Several examples will be presented to illustrate the use of different code-

switching patterns across four generations of speakers.

This study thus aims to present how Yanito (structurally) functions in different

generations of Gibraltarians by reflecting on and describing how the linguistic code has evolved

in relation to societal transformations and how it stands out as a representation of a local

identity. We observed that Yanito is described by speakers as a distinctive code with an

important identity value, and we located it as the center of a linguistic continuum in the

community of Gibraltar.

Based on the observations, we consider the study of Gibraltar and its local variety of

code-switching important for current research on language shifts and contact linguistics

(English–Spanish).