Bilingüismo e interferencia: Spanglish vs yanito

Abstract

The Hispanic community in the United States has a linguistic peculiarity that is unique in the American continent.
The mixture between the Spanish spoken in the different Latin American countries and American English has led to the formation
of a linguistic variant known as Spanglish. Gibraltar is a small British colony located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.
Gibraltarians form a multicultural community, with inhabitants of British, Andalusian, Genoese, Maltese, Portuguese, Arab, Jewish
and North African descent. This mix of cultures is also reflected in the Rock’s linguistic situation. The linguistic mix has given rise to
Yanito or llanito, a hybrid variant, a mixture of Andalusian dialect and British English, which also incorporates linguistic elements of
Maltese, Portuguese, Genoese, Italian and Haquetía (Judeo-Spanish dialect) origin, but also involves alternating between English and
Spanish. As we can see, both cases involve English-Spanish codeswitching. Our aim is to see how these two linguistic varieties are
similar and how they differ. In this paper, we intend to present the differences and similarities between Spanglish and Yanito. To do so, in the first part of the article we will start with a brief introduction to the historical facts that led to the creation of Spanglish and
Yanito. Then we will present the linguistic characteristics of these two varieties, taking into account their different areas: phonetics,
morphology, syntax and lexicon, based on some texts and videos in which Spanglish and Yanito are spoken.