A rich linguistic heritage
At the beginning of the Second World War the population of Gibraltar was evacuated to safer British territories. The British Government was surprised to discover that these families «spoke, thought and lived in Spanish». Vicenta López, who worked as a servant in Gibraltar in the late 1940s remembers: «Many llanitos spoke Spanish amongst themselves not just with the women from La Línea who were servants in their houses. The British military, however, couldn’t speak Spanish. So people who worked with them learnt some English».
In the 1970s, following the closure of the border, English gradually replaced Spanish as the main language for communication. Spanish is still the mother tongue or one of the main languages for communicating for the older generations in Gibraltar, and is the majority language for the cross-border workers.
Cross-border relations meant different linguistic loans in both directions. The local speech of Gibraltar or llanito is based on Andalusian, and employs literal translations from English and the so-called «code switching», while incorporating words from other languages such as Genoese, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese and Maltese. Many words and expressions from llanito are used in La Línea or in the whole region. Furthermore, in La Línea they use many specific words deriving from English and the other languages that were spoken in Gibraltar.