Walter Finch
SPANIARDS have once again been entranced by Gibraltar’s unique dialect llanito after a clip of people speak it went viral.
The segment, from Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘City Pulse’, featured a panel of Gibraltarians discussing children’s education on the Rock.
It quickly amassed nearly 100,000 views in just six hours, with Spanish viewers fascinated by one participant’s mixed-language comment: ‘I don’t want my children to be el coñazo’ – ‘it’s the best thing I’ve heard,’ said one Spaniard.
The clip showed how the speakers effortlessly switch from English to Andalucian Spanish mid-sentence – a phenomenon unknown in other bilingual regions of the world such as Puerto Rico.
In this context, el coñazo generally refers to something or someone that is extremely boring, tedious, or a pain to deal with, meaning the speaker doesn’t want their children to be such.
It is a colloquial Spanish term that doesn’t have a direct translation in English, illustrating how llanito speakers pick and choose from the two languages to best express themselves at any given moment.
The language includes lexical units combining both languages, adaptations of English or Spanish words, and even terms from Italian and Arabic.
“As an English philologist, llanito is my Roman Empire,” wrote one TikTok user, while another asked the Llanitos if there were specific grammar rules they follow or ‘is it just what flows?’
Another user was more perplexed: “It doesn’t make sense, there’s no pattern to switching languages ??as and when they please.”
“There are academics who feel that it is a language in its own right,” Minister John Cortes told the Olive Press.
“They believe it has developed characteristics of its own which are neither Spanish nor English, nor what’s called Spanglish.”
However, Cortes noted that ‘it’s very difficult to write in llanito as you have to change the phonetics.’
He added: “If I were to write Llanito, I would probably use words in English and Spanish, but you’d have to read it in Llanito in order to pronounce it correctly.”
Whether it’s a dialect or a language in its own right, Llanito is in danger of dying out – it’s less spoken among the younger generations of Gibraltarians, for whom even Spanish is becoming less fluent.
