News

From 17 to 22 April, Cristina Suárz-Gómez and Elena Seoane carried out research at Gibraltar, recording data from Gibraltar College and spontaneous conversations. Thei visit to the University of Gibraltar mad eit to the front page of the Gibraltar Chronicle, shown here. We are grateful for the support received by the Ministry of Education as well as the Chamber of Commerce, Gibraltar Cultural Services, the Youth Center, the Chief Justice and the Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation, among many other institutions and individuals.

Looking forward to coming back!

Gibraltarian TV channel GBC interviewed Elena Seoane regarding the compilation of ICE-GBR and the book that the team is preparing, Languages in Gibraltar - 20 Linguistic Biographies. The piece of news also included information about the new National Book Council and, most importantly, the words of the Minister of Education, Dr John Cortes, expressing his full support to the three languages of the country as vehicles of literature creation.

The news can be watched and read here: New study to explore unique Gibraltarian linguistic culture.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Languages of Gibraltar - 20 Linguistic Biographies by Mellen Press at the end of this year. This volume, edited by team members M.G. Sanchez, Elena Seoane, Cristina Suárez and Lucía Loureiro, contains the linguistic biographies of a diverse range of Gibraltarian men and women. Politicians, writers, journalists, PhD students and teachers will describe their linguistic experiences, focusing on elements such as education, emotions, biases and usages.

With this compendium we intend to raise awareness of the multilingual character of Gibraltarian society, and at the same contribute to the Yanito ‘renaissance’ currently been experienced in Gibraltar.

The written component of the International Corpus of English is now available at ICE-Gibraltar | ViEW - Variation in English Worldwide (uvigo.es).

The team is now working on the spoken component in close collaboration with M.G. Sanchez, The Ministry of Education and Culture and other public and private institutions in Gibraltar. To all of them we owe a debt of gratitude.

Exciting news coming from Gibraltar. The Gibraltar Government has just formed a national book council. The council intends to become a focal point in Gibraltar for all book and literature related activity. Its aim is to encourage writing and reading as well as to support writers, illustrators, and publishers, while working to promote Gibraltarian literature locally and internationally and offering advice to international academics interested in Gibraltarian writing, language and culture. The Council will be supported by the Ministry of Culture, which will provide the Secretariat, and by Gibraltar Cultural Services and its CEO Seamus Byrne.

The council’s seven members are the Gibraltarian Minister of Culture Professor John Cortes, the poet and journalist Giordano Durante, the English school teacher Melissa Bosano, the writer and columnist Jonathan Pizarro, the lawyer and University of Cambridge academic Dr Jamie Trinidad, Gibraltar Cultural Services Development Director Davina Barbara and the writer M. G. Sanchez, a member of ViEW.
A website for the council is currently under construction and should be up and running soon. For more details about the council, see this press release in dual language format (English and Spanish):
https://infogibraltar.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230301-C113-Se-crea...

In a letter published in today's Gibraltar Chronicle, Gibraltarian intellectual Charles Durante regards the introduction of Yanito in the annual Short Story Competition as an unequivocal move towards embracing Yanito as a language in its own right. Linguists have conferred Yanito the status of a distinctive language for a long time, and have shown interest in its linguistic characteristic at all levels: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, social and etymological, as well as other perspectives. This scientific interest in Yanito has at times met resistance, as is mentioned in the letter. Another obstacle for its study is the lack of resources - for instance, there is currently no corpus of Yanito. As Charles Durante says, "[t]he stories submitted in Yanito will provide a corpus of written Yanito" and this is a crucial step towards the scientific study and consequent diffusion of Yanito.

Most importantly, through this bold move Yanito acquires the prestige it deserves and this will will help to make it known outside the home domain. When speakers are proud of their culture and identity, they are proud of their language, and nothing can stand in their way.

Congratulations, Gibraltar!

Hon Dr John Cortes, Minister for the Environment, Sustainability, Climate Change, Heritage and Culture of Gibraltar, and Davina Barbara, officer for Gibraltar Cultural Services, met with us at the Ministry on 24th January regarding our ICE-GBR project, the compilation of the Gibraltarian Component of the International Corpus of English. He offered his full support, which has granted us access to data that are necessary for the completion of ICE-GBR. Without his help, this would not be possible and we are extremelly grateful for it.

On 24th January we visited the University of Gibraltar, where Ms Nadine Collado, Director of Professional Development & Continuing Education, organised a meeting with some staff members. As always, it was a pleasure to collaborate with the University to advance the ICE-GBR project (the Gibraltarian component of the International Corpus of English), and we are very grateful for it.

Looking forward to our next visit!

PhD students Heidi Douglas and Pablo Vilas successfully presented their work at the International Workshop Modelling the linguistic architecture of English: cognitive and empirical developments, organised by the LTVC group and the ELC research network. We are grateful for the rich feedback on their talks, namely Heidi's "Attitudes towards English as a Lingua Franca in Spain: A proposal" and Pablo's "A PhD in the making: Non-categorical morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes".