ICE-Gibraltar
The International Corpus of English – Gibraltar (ICE-GBR)
The written component of ICE-GBR is now available.
To get access to ICE-GBR you or your institution will need a valid license. To get academic license and obtain the corpus and manual, fill in the license form available HERE and send it to elena.seoane@uvigo.gal. You should receive the data within about 7 working days.
Note: You need to send your request from an academic e-mail to prove your educational status.
The International Corpus of English (ICE) is an international project in which researchers working on English varieties world-wide compile comparable corpora of individual national or regional varieties. So far, corpora for Canada, East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania), Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Uganda and the USA have been completed and are made available for non-profit research.
The ViEW members have collected the Gibraltar written component of ICE and hope to finish the spoken one soon. We have recently managed to establish successful collaboration with our colleagues from different Gibraltarian Institutions (Ministry of the Environment, Sustainability, Climate Change, Heritage and Culture of Gibraltar, Gibraltar Cultural Services, University of Gibraltar, Gibraltar College, Gibraltar Chamber of Commerce, among others) and Gibraltarian writer and project member M.G. Sanchez, whose selfless help we truly appreciate.
Work on this project has also yielded the publication of seven articles and chapters discussing topics such as the general contribution of Gibraltar to the history of English, its characterization within different World Englishes models, the effects of language contact and also interviews with Gibraltarian intellectuals (see below).
How to cite the corpus: Seoane, Elena, Suárez-Gómez, Cristina, Loureiro-Porto, Lucía & Douglas, Heidi. 2023. International corpus of English-Gibraltar (ICE-GBR). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7690749. http://view0.webs.uvigo.es/ice-gibraltar [Data set].
About Gibraltar
Gibraltar has a population of approximately 30,000 and covers an area of some 6 km2 at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. Is has been subject to British sovereignty since 1713, when English became the official language. The use of English was at first restricted to the military sphere and among the British themselves, who having arrived in the area, naturally came into contact with Spanish, the official language of Gibraltar since 1462. English soon became the language used in most official spheres, and the language, hence, which had to be learnt by anyone with professional aspirations. This was especially the case after attempts by Spain to regain Gibraltar by force, first in the 19th century and then during Franco’s regime (1968), fostering a strong “Hispanophobia” in the territory which persists to this day. Nevertheless, due to Spanish roots of part of the population, as well as for obvious geographic reasons, Spanish remains one of the languages of Gibraltar, spoken with its own distinct Andalusian accent. In fact, the modern day population of Gibraltar can be described as a very homogeneous ethnic group, relatively competent in both English and Spanish, but who also speak Yanito. This is the local vernacular language which identifies Gibraltarians and which has emerged as a result of code-switching mainly from Spanish and English, but also with minor influences from Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Reading
Alameda Hernández, Ángel. The Discursive Construction of Gibraltarian Identity in the Press: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Editorial Articles on the Gibraltar Issue. PhD dissertation, University of Granada, 2006.
Ballantine, Sergius J. (2000) English and Spanish in Gibraltar: Development and characteristics of two languages in Gibraltar. Gibraltar Heritage Journal 7: 115−124.
Cal Varela, Mario (1996) Hacia una concepción prototípica de comunidad de habla: Gibraltar. Atlantis XVIII (1–2): 37–52.
Chevasco, David. 2019. Contemporary Bilingualism, Llanito and Language Policy in Gibraltar. Editorial UCA.
Errico, Elena. ‘Hace dos años para atrás que fui a Egipto…: sobre algunas semejanzas entre el español de Gibraltar o yanito y el español de Estados Unidos’, Confluenze. Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani, 7, 2015.
Feijoo, Sonia (2015). "Somos más British que los British": Gibraltar: Code-Switching im Dienst der Identitätskonstruktion. (NIHIN New Ideas in Human Interaction). Dissertation: Albert Ludwig Universität Freiburg
Fuchs, Kathrin (2009). The use of the present perfect in Gibraltarian English. MA dissertation. Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg.
Goria, Eugenio (2018). Inglese e spagnolo a Gibilterra. Le dinamiche del discorso bilingue. Caissa.
Goria, Eugenio (2020). The road to fusion: The evolution of bilingual speech across three generations of speakers in Gibraltar. International Journal of Bilingualism 25 (2): 384-400.
Goria, Eugenio (2021). Complex items and units in extra-sentential code switching. Spanish and English in Gibraltar. In Backus A., Hakimov N. (Eds.), Usage-based Contact Linguistics: Effects of Frequency and Similarity. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(2), 383–399.
Goria, Eugenio and Marta Rodríguez García (2023). Backflagging revisited: A case study on bueno in English-Spanish bilingual speech. Journal of Pragmatics 215: 113-130
Kellerman, Anja (2001) A New New English. Language, Politics and Identity in Gibraltar. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Schriften zur Sprache und Kultur.
Kramer, Johannes (1986) English and Spanish in Gibraltar. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Krug, Manfred, Valentin Werner and Ole Schützler (2020). How British is Gibraltar English? In Crossing Linguistic Boundaries. Systemic, Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in English, ed. by Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma; López-Couso, María José; Méndez-Naya, Belén; Pérez-Guerra, Javier. London : Bloomsbury Academic, 153-186.
Levey, David (2008) Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levey, David (2011) National Identity and Allegiance in Gibraltar. In: Catherine McGlynn, Andrew Mycock & James W. McAuley (eds), British Identities since 1707: British, Identity and Citizenship. Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang.
Levey, David (2015) Gibraltar English. In: Jeffrey P. Williams, Edgar W. Schneider, Peter Trudgill & Daniel Schreier (eds), The Lesser-Known Varieties of English vol 2, 51-69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lipski, John. 1986. ‘Sobre el bilingüismo anglo-hispánico en Gibraltar’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 87.
Loureiro-Porto and Cristina Suárez-Gómez (2017). "Language contact in Gibraltar English: A pilot study with ICE-GBR." English as a Contact Language: Variation and Diffusion, ed. by J.A Sánchez-Fajardo and I. Palacios-Martínez. Special Issue of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 30: 93-119.
Moro Quintanilla, Mónica. 2018. ‘The Status of Nouns in Yanito Borrowings or Code-Switches?’, in Taking Stock to Look Ahead: celebrating Forty Years of English Studies in Spain. Zaragoza: Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de Zaragoza.
Moyer, Melissa G. (1998) Bilingual conversation strategies in Gibraltar. In: Peter Auer (ed.), Code–Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity, 215–234. New York: Routledge.
Neidig, Andrea. 2008. Englisch und Spanisch im Kontakt: das Yanito in Gibraltar: eine soziolinguistische Untersuchung. Johannes Herrmann Verlag.
Paciorkowski, Tomasz. 2019. ‘Brexit – and now what? A post-referendum survey into linguistic and national attitudes in Gibraltar’, Beyond Philology, 16.
Peake, Bryce. 2012. ‘Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 9.
Said-Mohand, Aixa. 2010. Inglés y español en Gibraltar: usos y actitudes lingüisticas entre la población joven, Revista Estudios Filológicos, 19.
Sánchez-Saus Laserna, Marta. 2023. ‘Español e inglés en contacto. La situación lingüística de Gibraltar’, Andalucía en la historia, 79.
Seoane, Elena (2016). "Telling the true Gibraltarian story: Interview with Gibraltarian writer M.G. Sanchez". Alicante Journal of English Studies 29: 251-258.
Seoane, Elena (2017). 'A Gibraltar in the making: Interview with Dr. Jennifer Ballantine Perera.' Canarian Journal of English Studies 75: 217-225.
Seoane, Elena, Cristina Suárez-Gómez and Lucía Loureiro-Porto (2018). " The ICE project looks at Iberia: The International Corpus of Gibraltar English" In María Ferrández San Miguel and Claus-Peter Neuman (eds.). Taking Stock to Look Ahead: Celebrating Forty Years of English Studies in Spain. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitaria de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 241-247.
Seoane, Elena, M.G. Sanchez, Lucía Loureiro-Porto, Cristina Suárez-Gómez (forthcoming). Gibraltarians and their language: 21 Linguistic Biographies. Vigo: Servicio de Publicacions da Universidade de Vigo.
Silva Folgar, Verónica (forthcoming). Spanish discourse markers in Gibraltar English. BA dissertation. University of Vigo.
Suárez-Gómez, Cristina (2012) English in contact with other European languages (Italian, Spanish, Slavic). In: Alexander Bergs & Laurel J. Brinton (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook. Volume II (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 34.2), 1738-1753. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Suárez-Gómez, Cristina (2020). "Applying the EIF model to English in non-postcolonial Overseas Territories: The case of Gibraltar English" In Buschfeld, Sarah & Alexander Kautzsch (eds.) Modelling Current Linguistic Realities of English World-Wide: A Joint Approach towards Postcolonial and Non-Postcolonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 347-370.
Suárez-Gómez, Cristina and Elena Seoane (forthcoming). Gibraltar English. The New Cambridge History of the English Language (General Editor: Raymond Hickey). Vol IV: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe ed. by Raymond Hickey.
Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti. 2022. Pseudo-Allomorphy of Articles and Articulated Prepositions in Llanito, Revue des linguistes de l'université, 84.
Weston, D. (2011) Gibraltar’s position in the Dynamic Model of Postcolonial English. English World-Wide 32(3): 338-367.
Weston, D. (2013) Code-switching variation in Gibraltar. International Journal of Bilingualism 17(1): 3-22.
