@Chiri,
After looking at video the article was more academic in my opinion although I agree the examples given were questionable at best. I was going to inquire about that. Do you know the name of the local linguist in the video? He does not seem strong as a subject matter expert and as a linguist how can he call the subjunctive a tense? A linguist surely knows that there are three moods in Spanish- indicative, subjunctive and the imperative mood. The moods have tenses i.e. the indicate and subjunctive have tenses. The subjunctive is a mood. Maybe he has better material than this. Just my observation.
Dale Buttigieg. As some of the commenters on the YouTube video noted, he got that detail wrong.
Therefore, is Yanito an official world language? This is what I am trying to determine based on the article and the video. At the 4:55 mark of the video the linguist says ‘I consider Yanito a language’ but is it or is just a local form of communication? In school, are students educated in straight English? What are the grammatical parameters around Yanito?
Once I learned a bit about this language it strikes me as another hybrid but very localized. It seems to be at risk since the population of Gibraltar is small combined with the fact that less people speak that form of language today. For any language to survive it needs speakers. A language is a part of cultural patrimony thus the concern in the article and video. How does a person that speaks Yanito communicate with a person that speaks pure Spanish?
It hasn't got any official status as a language, but Dale is on a quest to have it recognised as such and tries to formalise a written phonetically spelled Yanito, similar to Haitian Kreyol or Papiamento in the NL Antilles. More realistically though, it is a hybrid. I'm not sure whether it is closer to a patois or a creole.
The official language is English and we weren't allowed to speak any Spanish at school, apart from during actual Spanish lessons and to some extent in the less formal lessons like art and PE. Spanish is taught as a second language, using the UK curriculum. Yanito was traditionally the home and street language so we know all the names of household items (mainly in Spanish) but in formal settings - workplace, school, institutions - the familiar vocabulary is all in English.
For example, when the border reopened in the 1980s and people started going into Spain they would use Yanito words thinking they were Spanish (
queque for cake,
marchapie (Genoese) for pavement/sidewalk), and would find themselves struggling when having to use the terms we only knew in English e.g. banking transactions. When someone goes to hospital in Spain they have to learn all the Spanish names for procedures, diseases, specialisms, etc. because the health system in Gibraltar is British and in the earlier days was administered by people sent over from the UK. Now it is locally administered but the institutional language is English.
There was also a class distinction - better off families tended to speak more English at home, while working class families, often with mothers from Spain who didn't speak any English at all, only spoke Spanish at home and the children would enter the education system at 4 or 5 without knowing much English.
It's difficult to define how it works grammatically - a lot of code-switching with Spanish as the basis peppered with words in English and the other languages mentioned. Usually nouns, but also less familiar verbs. Unlike Spanglish speakers in the Americas they don't convert verbs like 'to print' into Spanish as 'printear' but use the structure 'hacer printing'.
A lot of Yanito speakers are "alingual" and struggle to maintain a conversation when speaking to someone who only speaks Spanish or English. Others speak perfectly good English but will switch to
Yanito in certain situations. It is rarer to find Gibraltarians who speak good Spanish, unless they studied it at university or had a well-educated Spanish parent.
Needless to say Spanish as a language can and will hold its own and the same holds true for English which is a Lingua Franca too thus making it harder for this form of communication like Yanito that derived from other languages to survive unless the spoken population base is maintained or increases.
-MP.
As the El Pais article points out, Spanish and
Yanito are fading from use in Gibraltar as English becomes more predominant in home and informal life. It hasn't disappeared completely, though. Walking around the streets and hearing snatches of
Yanito conversation is quite the experience and one of my favourite things about being in Gibraltar.