I would like to explore in this opinion piece some aspects of language which have recently been highlighted by Mr Eric Ellul’s letter to the Chronicle of the 11th November, ‘A different view.’
Firstly, I must thank Mr Ellul for having so eloquently expressed the traditional view of languages in Gibraltar, especially our unique creation, Llanito. Mr Ellul’s thesis reflects the mainstream thinking of the 60sand 70s about the nature of language and its use. This view is now considered narrow, old-fashioned, prescriptive and lacking in linguistic sophistication. It unequivocally condemns any blending and mixing of languages, the desideratum being a strict purism, where languages are hermetically sealed off and exist in a kind of linguistic apartheid.
This striving for purism is misconceived. Mr Ellul rightly sings the praises of English and Spanish, and every effort should be lavished on promoting these two world languages among our young generation. However, English is also the result of the mingling of languages. The original stratum of English was Anglo-Saxon, a language you cannot now understand unless you have studied it. In 1066, the Normans invaded and introduced Norman French. This led to a great deal of confusion at the beginning, with the two languages competing for supremacy. There must have been occasions when a poor Saxon struggled to express himself in Norman French and made a pig’s ear of it! Slowly, the two languages coalesced, and the result was Chaucer’s English. Later, during the Renaissance, there was a huge input of Latin, Greek, Italian which widened English vocabulary and culture. So, the King’s English is as much the result of blending, fusing and mingling as Llanito!
Readers obviously know I am an advocate of Llanito, so I do not share Mr Ellul’s disparagement of our language and, by implication ourselves, as only useful as a vehicle for humour and self-deprecation. That view reduces the Gibraltarians to Beckettian jesters, forever waiting for the arrival of a language expert who will set them right.
There are instructive parallels with other languages which show that the creation of Llanito has been replicated in other parts of the world. I can think of Yiddish, the dynamic vernacular of the Ashkenazim, and lovingly called the mama-loshen, the mother tongue or language. This blend of Hebrew and German became both the language of the home and later the vehicle of a wonderful literature. Maybe many a curmudgeonly, crusty old rabbi deplored this linguistic phenomenon, and berated its use, preferring the loshen-ha-kodesh, the sacred language, but both can exist amicably to their mutual enrichment. A similar situation obtains in Gibraltar: we use English and Spanish with fluency and aplomb, and they appear to set the standard; but Llanito is also practised with verve, in more informal situations and among like-minded people.
Another canard is that Llanito can only be used in humorous situations or to elicit a laugh. But I’ve read stories written in Llanito which have a serious and, in fact tragic, denouement. I also know someone who is translating, or more accurately, rendering parts of the gospels into Llanito.
There is a crucial difference between knowing a language and knowing about language. The upholders of the antiquated view described above, know a language or languages, but usually lack the metalanguage required to talk about language in a scientific and objective way. They deal in generalisations, (‘However, to foster Llanito as an independent language and culture is pretentious…….’from Mr Ellul’s letter), without adducing a shred of evidence, so that what they claim is just an expression of a mere whim, a grouse about what they see as a lowering of standards, a jaundiced view of what they deprecate. In modern linguistics, every statement must be backed by concrete evidence taken from the corpus of languages. Saying something does not make it so!
What I consider a more enlightened view of Llanito is not a solipsistic indulgence on my part. The following have all, in different ways, expressed an interest and have given Llanito their support: GFAMS, two of whose members, Manuel Enriles and Dale Buttigieg, are actively involved in raising language awareness and practise writing in Llanito; GBC and GCS, which have collaborated recently in creating the programme, ‘Llanito, exploring the Landscape,’ jointly produced and presented by Lizanne Figueras and Davina Barbara, a very stimulating, varied and entertaining look at Llanito; Cambridge University, the entity behind the magnificent exhibition ‘Llanito, past, present and future;’ the universities of Vigo and the Balearic Islands, both involved in studying and classifying Llanito; the editorial team of the Patuka Press and its contributors; local writers such as Gabriel Moreno, Mark Sanchez, Giordano Durante, Jonathan Teuma, Jackie Villa, et al. There have also been two key publications, ‘Gibraltarians and their language-22 linguistic biographies’ and the Patuka Press book, ‘Llanito.’ GCS introduced Llanito as a separate category in the short story and poetry competitions. GCS has also overseen the publication of the extant Llanito dictionaries. I see no evidence Mr Ellul is apprised of any of these key publications.
The fact that Llanito is confined to Gibraltar is quoted as a negative point. Speakers of indigenous languages in places like the rain forest in Brazil are often pressurised by the mega industrial companies and central government to give up their language and speak Brazilian Portuguese. But for tribe people, their language is an intrinsic part of their culture and identity: give up your way of speaking and you cease to be who you really are. By restricting ourselves to English and Spanish (superb languages though they are) and letting Llanito die, we would be in a similar situation. Interestingly, the so-called primitive languages are anything but primitive; linguistically, they are as, or even more evolved than, some of the great world languages. The reduced number of speakers of a language is, if anything, more reason for boosting and fostering it.
Often a language is denigrated for extra-linguistic reasons. Sadly, language prejudice often betrays social snobbery: only the uneducated speak Llanito, the jokers, the misfits, the ‘great unwashed.’ We even have those who speak Spanish with a pseudo-English accent, as if to show that they are exercising a special condescension by using a language other than English. And, of course, for these speakers, Llanito is beyond the pale.
Many years ago, I compared the Gibraltarian to Charlie Chaplin. My comparison raised some eyebrows-were we comedians, poor tramps, bedraggled, social outcasts? My meaning was the complete opposite: Chaplin usually played the little man who, despite of his diminutive size and obvious lack of physical strength, somehow outwitted the thugs and macho men who terrorised New York and, at the end, won the luscious girl who fell for his charm and winning personality.
‘Bad English and worse Spanish’ is the shibboleth of the denigrators of Llanito. But Llanito is neither; it is sui generis, a truly imaginative creation over the generations, something unique to Gibraltar and the Gibraltarians.
I think the time for aping (significant word, used by Mr Ellul) the English is well over. We now live in a post-imperial world, English is no longer the preserve of the English; in fact, we should more correctly speak of different ‘Englishes’ and not just English. If speaking English is, in your mind, associated with being an underdog and a subaltern, then you should switch to another language.
Language decay was the nightmare scenario of the eighteenth century and some of its most prestigious writers tried to control and arrest this spiral into chaos and nonsense. Dr Johnson’s famous dictionary was a herculean attempt to halt this putative decay; however, in his saner moments, even a dyed in the wool conservative like Johnson realised he was engaged on a Sisyphean task: what he called decay was just language change and evolution, a trend which is unstoppable and part of the very nature of language. Mr Ellul is a latter-day Johnson. He bemoans that Americanisms, texting, the changes wrought by the IT revolution are diluting our two languages and now to cap it all, we have that ‘mishmash’ Llanito undermining our two very important languages. But this conveys a false picture of language in Gibraltar. We don’t always have recourse to Llanito when we can’t think of the correct word in English or Spanish. Instead, we use Llanito when we feel it might convey a nuance of meaning which is not available in one of the other two languages, or when we want to generate a certain feeling of camaraderie, or when we want to identify as specifically Gibraltarian, or simply when we want to let our hair down!
‘Literary laziness,’ which should read ‘language laziness,’ does not characterise bilingual communities; au contraire, juggling two or three languages in your language faculty simultaneously requires intellectual nimbleness, mental plasticity and alertness. Monolinguals are more likely to suffer from mental torpor.
I cannot go into the historical background of Llanito in this short piece, but the claim Llanito only started during the evacuation is patently wrong. There must have been some form of Llanito much earlier on as the local population developed their own their own lingua franca which distinguished them from the English and the Spaniards. The catalogue of the Llanito exhibition produced by Cambridge University provides ample evidence of this. Readers interested in the characteristics which make Llanito a language are referred to an essay, ‘Llanito: Grammar, Etymology and Identity’ which appeared in the Putuka Press publication ‘Llanito’ of July 2024.
Regrettably, Llanito is held up to ridicule in Mr Ellul’s letter. This negative and supposedly superior attitude is reminiscent of the approach adopted by colonists when confronted with what they considered the inferior language of the natives they were about to exploit. Thankfully, we have English and Spanish to save us from this ignominious fate!
The Gibraltarians reflected in Mr Ellul’s linguistic mirror use a passable English, write substandard Spanish and laugh at themselves in Llanito. My experience of language is diametrically the opposite: many Llanitos speak and write an idiomatic English, dynamic and versatile; they speak a kind of Andalucian Spanish which, again, is easily comprehensible and serves our daily needs admirably; and our Llanito is colourful, expressive and a true product of our indigenous culture.
