‘Gibraltarians And Their Language’ — Book Review
By Charles Durante
‘Gibraltarians and their Language’ comprises 22 linguistic biographies written by Gibraltarians. This innovative, ambitious project was initiated and overseen by a team of academics, including the internationally renowned novelist, Mark Sanchez. The academics involved are the following: Professor Elena Seoane (University of Vigo) and Professors Cristina Suárez-Gómez and Lucía Loureiro-Porto (University of the Balearic Islands). The introduction was written by Mark Sanchez and Elena Seoane.
In their overview of the Gibraltarian linguistic landscape, the two intrepid scholars define Llanito as a ‘Western Mediterranean Hispanic variety made up of an Andalusian Spanish base, much vocabulary from English, and elements of Genoese, Haketia, Menorcan Catalan and Moroccan Darija Arabic with interesting grammatical developments of its own.’ The linguistic biographies will see the speakers of Llanito wrestling with, articulating and expressing themselves in their own language, and at the same time, using their own brand of English and Spanish. This language potpourri defines the Gibraltarian who is an amphibious creature, intellectually, culturally and linguistically. Though the authors think the prognosis for Llanito is not good, they see hopeful signs in the many people who are now actively engaged in studying, defining and promoting it. There is a new linguistic consciousness in Gibraltar and this publication is testimony to that renaissance. The aim of this review is to elicit a positive response and entice potential readers to delve into the very personal stories of fellow Gibraltarians and their experience with English, Spanish and Llanito.
All the contributors are what Claire Trinidad in her piece, ‘In search of my mother tongue,’ calls ‘language curious.’ She then proceeds to revel in her own language, saying ‘I am proud to speak Llanito. It is an intrinsic element of my identity.’ Early in the biographies we encounter the complex relationship between language and identity. The two mainstream languages fail in this regard: though we speak English, we are not English. Spanish is often quoted by some of the writers as their mother tongue, but we are not Spanish.
Giordano Durante echoes Claire when he glories in our language. He unequivocally characterises the world of officialdom as stubbornly English, whereas Spanish, and especially Llanito, are the languages of social interaction and, in school, the languages of subversion — using either was seen as undermining the status quo.
The dichotomy found in the social stratum in Gibraltar led to Giordano having two sets of friends: the English speaking ‘posh’ guys with connections to the Yacht Club and parents in the high-calibre professions and the scions of the working class, dabbling in low-grade criminality and speaking mainly Spanish/Llanito. It is this linguistic ‘mestizaje’ that Giordano treasures and which he savours when swearing in Spanish/Llanito (a trait often commented on by many of the contributors). He deprecates losing our bilingualism and enjoys recalling how Spanish in school was considered subversive. Two violent metaphors appear in his piece that convey the loss of a language: it is like suffering an amputation or self-blinding. They indicate the visceral level at which language operates. The language snobs are animadverted and criticised for mistaking language purism (English only!) for social kudos. Disappointingly, the idea that cultivating English is a sign of social superiority is still prevalent. You still come across the ridiculous antics of locals from a privileged background speaking Spanish with a pseudo-English accent! Instead, Giordano prefers to savour the words he learnt from his grandmother: chorizo, tocino, garbanzo……toothsome words charged with nostalgia, power, memory, childhood, grandparents. ‘We are mired in language,’ and all the contributors agree.
Humbert Hernandez lovingly describes his humble family background. His family had strong ties to Spain, so that Spanish was spoken at home. When he admitted his mother was Spanish, he was called a ‘rabúo’, an insulting epithet for Spaniards. The language problem in Gibraltar has had many ramifications. A teacher’s refusal to listen to his plea in Spanish to go to the toilet led to his peeing himself in a class-embarrassing episode. Humbert has always felt that his first heartfelt language was Spanish. This predilection for Spanish has been expressed beautifully in his own writings which, except for two nonfiction books written in English, have been crafted in Spanish. Humbert went on to acquire a posh English accent, proving that a close attachment to one language does not disable you from mastering another one. He would like to see a reversal of the present trend towards monolingualism back to bilingualism. He deprecates that only one measly hour is devoted to Spanish in schools.
John Cortes’ article has a telling title: ‘The strap that killed Llanito — well, it tried.’ He always assumed his mother tongue was English in spite of having a Spanish-speaking mother and speaking mainly Spanish when young. As in the case of many Gibraltarians, the language question became acute when formal education started. The Christian Brothers and the Loreto Nuns were entrusted with the solemn task of inculcating English in their young charges. Their misplaced zeal led to appalling behaviour, on the part of the Christian Brothers, especially. Any deviation from the official line (English only) was summarily punished. At this time corporal punishment was still allowed, hence John’s allusion to the strap. And to think education was almost exclusively in their hands! Being punished for speaking Spanish made Spanish the language of the outlaw. Brothers and nuns were willing agents of English dominance; they should have known better, coming from a country terrorised and repressed by the British.
Jackie Villa: In memoriam. Jackie’s lugubrious title is belied by exuberant content of her article. Her essay is an impassioned plea for the revival of Spanish and Llanito. Her mum was from Los Barrios and Jackie highlights the importance of patio life for the use of Spanish. Spanish was the language of the playground, and she went to school ‘sin una papa de inglés.’ All agree that Spanish expletives are more mouth-filling than English ones. She blames school for the loss of Spanish. Because of her accent, she was labelled ‘a bloody foreigner.’ Jackie has been heavily involved in directing plays where language has been a vital concern. Trying to identify an accent has always been a problem. Only the English set so much store by your accent. Your accent is a shibboleth: it confers entry into a privileged circle, or it banishes you to the boondocks! Jackie’s experience with language clearly shows that immersion in Spanish when young is no obstacle to obtaining a university degree in English.
Rebecca Calderon’s contribution is different from most of the others. Ab initio, Rebecca is not a Llanita, but English with an interesting family background, having an English mother and an Anglo-Indian father. She went to a school which failed to inspire a love of learning, though she was naturally curious and avid for learning. Rebecca does not fall into the old stereotype of the British abroad: she has travelled widely and enjoyed encountering different languages, though she never had the chance to master any fully. She attained a GCSE in Spanish, but that qualification did not improve her spoken Spanish. The reason is obvious: in a community like Gibraltar where almost everyone speaks English, there’s no real incentive to speak Spanish; anyway, everyone assumes that if you are English, you must be monolingual. Undeterred, Rebecca has undertaken to compile a new dictionary of Llanito, which will collate the works of Tito Vallejo, Manuel Cavilla and Johannes Kramer. She has also consulted a Spanish work, ‘La Línea de la Concepción Guía Crítica’ by Juan Manuel Ballesta Gómez. Together with the work of GFAMS and the Patuka Press, the future of written Llanito looks brighter than ever! Rebecca’s reference book will prove invaluable to all users of our own language.
Nowadays the Clifford Report would be condemned as infamous and smacking of the worse kind of paternalism and imperial disdain. The report lamented the deep roots of Spanish influence — it was therefore necessary to combat (notice the military jargon, reminiscent of Britain’s presence here, enforced through military might) the Spanish mental process. You were expected to guard against Spanish infiltration (again, the use of military vocabulary, as if Spanish were an outlaw language, calculated to undermine British hegemony). Jamie Trinidad mentions the report’s twofold aims: to eradicate or at least curtail the use of Spanish and concomitantly render proficiency in English a mark of intellectual and cultural prestige. Sadly, there are still people here who haven’t woken up from this imperial dream, unaware presumably, that holding this view betrays intellectual infantilism and lack of linguistic and cultural maturity. That so-called benefactor, John Mackintosh, shared this narrow view when he set up the hall which bears his name to promote exclusively the English language and culture. The Maori and Amerindians were subjected to a similar treatment. Put crudely, this was a kind of linguistic (though it also had social repercussions) apartheid . The imposition of English was one of the means used by the imperial power to subjugate the natives! This gave a feeling of inferiority to those who only spoke Spanish and made Spanish speakers look up to their colonial masters because they spoke English and you only spoke Spanish. Moreover, they spoke ‘proper English’ (whatever that is!) and your balbutient English was not quite up to scratch.
Accents are seen as divisive, a racial marker. Many of the contributors highlight the many occasions when their accent caused consternation and puzzlement. The Gibraltarian accent was labelled Welsh, Portuguese, and South African. This just shows how little the interlocutors knew about accents!
We can use a Freudian analogy: the mapping of the mind into the Superego, Consciousness and Subconscious or Unconscious could provide a helpful diagram for the functions of the different languages we employ in Gibraltar. Most contributors would agree that, intentionally or not, English acts like a superego, policing our language habits, and ensuring it is always used correctly. Because of its association with education, law and commerce, it enjoys a prestige never accorded to Spanish. However, at the conscious level, Spanish still operates regardless of English, and fills our hearts, minds and bodies with feelings, nostalgia, passions, and energy. The Superego here plays no part and consequently, we are not overly taxed if we make some mistakes and deviate from standard Spanish with the excuse that ‘aquí lo decimos asín’ (sic). Deep down, at some subconscious level, maybe even unconscious, Llanito dwells, ready to surface at any moment, when the occasion warrants it. A flare up of passion, a sudden rush of emotion, conviviality, feeling close to those around you, the need to establish your identity, when the English superego has taxed your patience and you want to enjoy complete linguistic freedom, you burst into Llanito, where rules are less clearly defined, where you have more lexical, syntactic and grammatical freedom. Llanito works at a primeval level in the Gibraltarian psyche, infusing what we say with oomph, vitality and genuine passion.
Many contributors mention the way teachers enforced the ‘English only policy,’ meting out punishment to those who infringed the harsh rule. Sadly, parents were complicit in ensuring that English dominated life and even poor grandparents, whose English was rudimentary, were persuaded to play a role.
The onus for reviving Llanito/Spanish has been placed fully on the Department of Education and rightly so, as their former ‘English only’ policy sounded the death knell of Spanish and Llanito. Their wrong-headed approach reflected a lack of understanding of how language works. Also, behind this gauche move, there was a dislike of all things Spanish. Since the time of the Clifford Report, Spanish was associated with lack of intellectual acumen and coarseness — this assumption just reflects the administrators’ own impoverished understanding of Spanish. They should have read Cervantes, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Lorca, Salinas and Machado and they would have realised that Spanish is as sophisticated as English.
Gabriel Moreno speaks of his Andalusian slang-infused school patio exchanges; Giordano Durante mentions that ‘Spanish was subversive, a secret tongue;’ it possessed an anti-Establishment streak; the language of potential dissent. The Establishment was wholly identified with the English language.
Nearly all the contributors agree that the Evacuation and later the closure of the frontier had an incalculable impact on our linguistic sensibilities. A mainly Spanish-speaking people were suddenly confronted with a new language (though some already had a nodding acquaintance with English) and an alien culture. Many acquired a smattering of the new language (I recall my mother’s English) and became inveterate tea-drinkers! Spanish now had a rival in the linguistic field. We can trace the steady decline of Spanish from then. The closure of the frontier exacerbated this trend to supplant Spanish and the Evacuation made the returning refugees imitate, however awkwardly, their colonial masters.
Jonathan Teuma is a true lover of languages. His very absorbing piece celebrates the sheer abundance and richness of the linguistic world. Having travelled widely, he picked up Portuguese in Mozambique and now struggles to keep his newly acquired language apart from Spanish! He has also been exposed to other languages in the US and Angola. Jonathan has no problem with adapting to different languages, their grammar, prosody and accents. Like other Gibraltarians, he has been mistakenly taken for Welsh. I can only think our lilt and sing-song intonation resemble the Welsh accent and the Welsh anyway are renowned for their singing! Jonathan ends on an upbeat note: ‘we have already recognised in many spheres of society that Spanish needs to make a comeback in the education system……….All we need now is to take full consciousness of our heritage and our abilities to go for it.’
Reading Sophie Macdonald’s piece was particularly heartening. A young Cambridge graduate, she has devoted a dissertation to the study of Lanito, thereby bestowing academic respectability on the subject. Her essay also draws parallels between Chicanx texts, when she references the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, which highlights the similarities between Tejanos and Llanitos. Sophie has now undertaken postgraduate study on the relationship between Llanito and the Gibraltarian identity. Lanito has ceased to be a mere patois spoken by illiterate yokels!
Jackie Anderson’s sparkling essay gives us a taste of what some Gibraltarians have had to endure when confronting some of the inhabitants of the mother country. Beside encountering sheer ignorance vis-à-vis where Gibraltar is, she’s had to submit to racial slurs, having been called ‘spic’(from a distortion of ‘no speak the English?’); ‘wop’ (probably from Italian ‘guappo,’ showy); ‘dago’ (insulting way to refer to Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, probably from the name Diego). Jackie sums up her experience with the telling phrase: ‘ignorance peppered with racism.’
Gibraltarian hybridity is exemplified in Mark Sanchez’s very variegated family background. A grandfather, born in La Línea, who struggled with English, but sprinkled his speech with the odd Cockney phrase! This linguistic wonder was baptised as an Anglican and had grandparents hailing from Jimena and Manchester. But the star family member must have been his grandmother Bertha and her ‘prefiereh que te haga un sanwee com jamón de Jorrk?’ Mark’s incisive piece gathers a cutting- edge relevance when he itemizes what I would call the detritus of empire: our blind adherence to some of the symbols and shibboleths of a rancid imperialism: military parades, twenty-one gun salutes, Churchill, and other trumpery. He ends his article with a clarion call to all Gibraltarians who value their true heritage: cultural bodies such as GFAMS and the Patuka Press have already taken up the challenge to promote our languages and indigenous culture. It seems that the gatekeepers, once very strident in their attempt to crush Llanito and extinguish Spanish (a well-known academic once said they would be quite happy if Spanish disappeared), have been silenced. They may be reconsidering their errors and solecisms, and we hope they will join us in our attempt to revel in our languages and become true Gibraltarians. As Gabriel Moreno says, we exist in the gap created by two failed empires. Let us nourish our culture with what is best of both empires, creating something which is truly ours.
I would have liked to comment on each article individually, but space and time are at a premium. If your article has not been explicitly singled out, it does not imply it does not deserve consideration, or that it is in any way below standard. A template emerges after reading all the articles: early immersion in Spanish/Llanito in childhood, an unconscious use of two languages which probably were not distinguished. Nursery and school marked the beginning of what Julian Felice calls our linguistic ‘paranoia’. This signalled the introduction of English and its undisputed dominance. Sadly, it also meant the downgrading of Spanish, with our educators punishing any deviation from the newly established norm. Disturbingly, our own people colluded with the colonial masters to implant a monolingual and monocultural straightjacket! Happily, in most cases, university opened our eyes to the richness of our indigenous culture and allowed us to reclaim what had been denied us by a blinkered establishment. We are now in the driver’s seat!
Anyone interested in our languages and in fostering our own culture should read this book. It is full of insightful aperçus into the nature of Llanito and the role it plays in our social interactions and in defining us as a people. We can only be grateful to all those who poured their thoughts and feelings into fascinating and informative articles. We must also thank the academic team for providing us with this wonderful opportunity to express our deepest preoccupations about our languages and culture.
Charles Durante is a retired English teacher who also contributed to the anthology under review. The book is currently for sale on unebook.es for 9.50 euros and will shortly be available on Amazon.
