Academic Article Compares Bilingual Speech In Gibraltar and Puerto Rico
A new pilot study comparing bilingual speech in Gibraltar and Puerto Rico has found that speakers in both communities use similar strategies when shifting topics in conversation, even though their sociolinguistic environments are very different.
While Puerto Rico remains largely Spanish‑dominant, Gibraltar has undergone a long‑term shift toward English, with Spanish functioning mainly as a heritage language alongside the locally rooted contact variety Llanito.
The study, authored by Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, and Melvin González, examined how bilinguals judge two types of structures.
YGTV spoke to one of the academics involved in the research, Professor M. Carmen Parafita Couto (University of Santiago de Compostela) to learn more about the findings.
She said: “Gibraltar and Puerto Rico make for a fascinating comparison because both communities bring Spanish and English into contact, but through very different histories and local repertoires.
“In our study, we asked speakers in both places to judge how natural different Spanish-English sentences sounded to them. We were especially interested in how speakers place a topic at the beginning of a sentence — the thing they want to talk about — before adding the rest of the message.
Professor Parafita Couto explained which examples were presented to participants: “To make the examples feel rooted in each community, we used food items drawn from local restaurant menus: chocos fritos / fried squid in Gibraltar and arroz con habichuelas / rice and beans in Puerto Rico. One Gibraltar example from the study was:
Los chocos fritos Mary los odiaba de chica, pero le gustaba la pasta.
“The fried squid, Mary hated when she was little, but she liked pasta.”
“Here, ‘los chocos fritos’ comes first because it is the topic of the sentence. The rest tells us something about it. What we wanted to understand was not simply whether Spanish and English appear together, but how speakers use their wider linguistic repertoire to organise information and meaning.”
She says that one of the reasons why the results of the study are significant is that they show that underlying patterns exist in multilingual speech: “The wider finding is that, despite the very different linguistic histories of Gibraltar and Puerto Rico, speakers in both communities showed similar patterns in their judgments. This suggests that multilingual speech is highly structured: it reflects local identity and history, but also shared cognitive and grammatical strategies for making meaning.”
The article was published in IDUS – Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla – and can be read on this link:
https://idus.us.es/server/api/core/bitstreams/7e04d51d-a858-4876-907c-31de50d2a8f0/content
Pic: Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
