Gibraltar’s streetnames: an eighteenth-century Western Mediterranean spatial practice of civilian fort-servicers

1 Introduction

In common with other British territories such as the Channel Islands, or former colonies such as Hong Kong, Gibraltar has a bilingual streetname system. Unlike these other territories, however, there is a modal disjunction between the variants: English variants are official, written on street signs, maps, and GPS systems, while Llanito variants are unofficial and oral only.^[1] This modal disjunction is accompanied by a referential disjunction, as the English and Llanito variants do not typically translate each other. The street named irish town, for example, was known in Spanish as Calle de Santa Ana.^[2] This system demonstrates the superimposition of British rule on a built environment established in antecedent periods of Moorish and Spanish sovereignty. It also reflects the dominance of the British garrison over the initially multilingual, then predominantly Llanito-speaking, now predominantly English-speaking, civilian population that grew up to service it. In this sense, this bilingual system indexes and particularizes how different speakerships memorialize the names of the spaces they inhabit, as shaped by asymmetries in power and status.

Unsurprisingly, given its history, Gibraltar is typically positioned as a site of dichotomies: garrison/town (Weiss Muller 2013), British/Spanish (Gold 2005), English/Spanish (Kramer 1986). In this article, we position Gibraltar as a node in a network of eighteenth-century Western Mediterranean forts. In so doing, our approach aligns itself with the tenets of lexical sociolinguistics (Wright 2023). The task of the lexicographer is to discover a word’s etymology; the task of the lexical sociolinguist is to discover what kind of speaker used that word in which social circumstances, and how it spread to other sorts of speakers. Accordingly, our overarching research questions in this paper are: how do Gibraltar streetnames demonstrate the movement of people from place to place, and how does this inform the bigger picture of Gibraltar’s linguistic history? What relevance does this have for present-day Gibraltarians? What would be lost should the Llanito variants be forgotten?

One of the advantages of taking a lexical sociolinguistics approach is that lexical influencers can sometimes be identified (Wright 2023: 102–120), a methodological affordance that is fundamental to our investigation. Our method has been to amass an onomasiological set relating to the concept of the ‘Gibraltarian streetname’. Using census data available online at the Gibraltar National Archives, we identify and plot social networks and communities of practice, and consider motivations for types of mobilities (Britain 2002, 2010). The families from Tetuan, Menorca, Genoa and other places (Tables 3 and 4) who have left their trace in Gibraltar’s onomasiological set of streetnames are identified, and their movements plotted around Western Mediterranea forts (see Section 4). We demonstrate that the personal names that appear across both the English and Llanito streetname variants memorialize the people who made a living from servicing these forts. Families went from Genoa to Fort St Philip in Menorca, then from Menorca to Gibraltar; from Tetuan and Ceuta (especially Jews, when expelled) to Gibraltar and Menorca, so that, over generations, a network of family relationships arose between these places. For example, Solomon Benzimra, a Jewish merchant recorded in the 1817 census as arriving in Gibraltar in 1782, was born in Menorca, had family roots in Tetuan, and owned residences in Gibraltar and Malta. His name occurs in Gibraltar’s Benzimra’s Alley , Benzimra Lane, Benzimra Passage, Pasage de Benzimbra, Callejon Benzimbra.^[3]

We focus here on one type of mobility, spatial practice, from Lefebvre’s (1974) theory that spatial lived experience is produced socially. In Dennis’s (2009: 1) translation and interpretation of Lefebvre, representation of space is the conceptual intention of the powerful (here, the Gibraltar ministers who commission English-language streetsigns); representational space is usage regardless of planners’ intent (here, speakers continuing to use Llanito streetnames rather than English ones); and spatial practice:

[…] could be interpreted as the material expressions of these representations in action and movement: actually building an environment of boulevards or apartment blocks, or introducing regulations to control land use or manage traffic; or occupying space, not just symbolically, as in carnival, but in the practices of everyday life, the routine of the journey to work […] (Dennis 2009: 1)^[4]

Significant words here are action, movement, routine. Speakers act and move, and do so repeatedly and did so historically, and this is one of the motivators for the spread of linguistic features. We interpret spatial practice to refer to the places to which individuals repeatedly journeyed. This is comparable to Dennis’s ‘routine of the journey to work’, highlighted by Britain (2012) as a significant present-day mobility – albeit in a historical context over a wider spatial and temporal range than a daily commute, with family members originating in one part of the Western Mediterranean, settling in another but remaining in contact, passing on skills, moving through the same waystations, and visiting back and forth over subsequent generations. Our understanding of ‘spatial practice’ thus merges with the notion of the ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) to depict an endeavour – itinerant fort-servicing – in which members were communally engaged, and in which they developed competence over many generations.

Although our exploration of Gibraltarian streetnames draws on the principles of lexical sociolinguistics, it is also relevant to the study of linguistic landscapes. As scholars within this field have demonstrated (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; Pennycook 2010), space and place are dynamic social constructions. Urry (2000: 149) describes place as:

a set of spaces where ranges of networks and flows coalesce, interconnect

and fragment. Any such place can be viewed as the particular nexus between,

on the one hand, propinquity characterised by intensely thick co-present

interaction, and on the other hand, fast flowing webs and networks stretched

corporeally, virtually and imaginatively across distances.

Our own investigation sees Gibraltar’s relationship with the wider Mediterranean in comparable terms. However, where the study of linguistic landscapes typically privileges semiotic, virtual and imaginative flows and networks, we are particularly concerned with the corporeal; that is to say, how and where human bodies moved, and what happened to the lexemes they took with them.

In Section 2 we provide a brief introduction to the history of British streetnames. In Section 2.1, we outline Gibraltar’s socio-political history and orography, and how these brought about its streetname system. In Section 2.2 we describe the impact of this socio-political history on the repeopling of British Gibraltar, and how this community came to service the garrison. This provides context for Section 3, where we present Gibraltar’s streetnames. In Section 4, we cast our gaze further afield to the forts and littorals of the Mediterranean, whose records help to situate Gibraltar as a node in the spatial practice of eighteenth-century fort-servicers. In Section 5 we highlight how women, in particular, propagated Llanito streetname variants, and how Gibraltar’s ongoing language shift from Llanito to English impacts this inheritance.

2 Introduction to streetnames

Personal-name constituents are found amongst the earliest streetnames, such as the Via Traiana named after the Emperor Trajan (98–117 CE) in whose reign the street was completed; or in an English-language context, Alwarnestret, Winchester, c.1110, ‘Æðelwaru’s Street’ (Biddle 2020: ch. 2). Ekwall (1954: 41–2) shows that the earliest streetnames in English record navigational perspectives, as shown in Table 1.

Within Britain, its Crown Dependencies and Ireland, bilingual streetnames occur in areas where more than one historic language is or was spoken, as shown in Table 2.

Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, all have bilingual streetnames on streetsignage. In the case of Manx and Cornish, however, these are no longer mother-tongues but are spoken as revived languages. In modern times these bilingual streetsigns serve to assert the presence of speakerships which are now minorities in their own homelands, but in none of these areas do bilingual streetsigns carry the primary function of orientation for monolingual readers of these languages, as there are no literate natives who cannot also read English. Rather, the function of historic languages on bilingual streetsigns is one of cultural identity. Bilingual streetsigns in Britain and its Crown Dependencies nowadays are indexical of the cultural groups that have lived for centuries in these domains, regardless of the linguistic competencies of present-day speakerships: “feelings of ethnic identity, certainly when buttressed by religion or by any institutional maintenance of political or cultural traditions, or by traditional economic roles, can survive total language loss” (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 239–40).

A multiplicity of names for one road is not, in itself, an unusual linguistic phenomenon. Wright (2023) illustrates this with the creation in 1970 of a new motorway through London which at the time of opening had managed to acquire four names. Three of these constitute representations of space names (here, governmental townplanners): The London to Fishguard Trunk Road (A40), used in legislation; The A40(M), used on roadsigns and by radio commentators broadcasting about traffic, and The Westway, used on maps and streetsigns; plus a representational space name (here, local residents): the elevated road. The longer a road is in existence, the more scope there is for it to acquire multiple names. In Spain, representations of space names have changed in line with the political sympathies of the governing classes. Streets honouring General Franco and his supporters 1939–1979 have been renamed by successive democratic governments – yet streets honouring King Juan Carlos I, who is credited with aiding the transition to democracy, have also been renamed due to recent disapproval of his comportment (e.g. Avenida Juan Carlos 1 in Salburua, Gasteiz/Vitoria was changed to Avenida de 8 de Marzo in 2020). Left-wing townhalls use Law 52/2007 Ley de Memoria Histórica (‘Historical Memory Law’) to justify changing streetnames they find disagreeable, and subsequent right-wing townhalls then use the same law to change them back again (Guilat and Espinosa-Ramírez 2016; González Faraco and Murphy 1997).

Since the nineteenth-century expansion of the built environment, a new ideological naming-motivation has come into being where ‘X’s street’ preserves the memory not of someone who lived in the street but an unaffiliated personage who was admired by officialdom, e.g. Raglan Street, Kentish Town, London, named after Lord Raglan who commanded the British Army in the Crimean War (died 1855, street built shortly thereafter), and the acts of such personages, such as Trafalgar Square, 1805, after the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805. In twentieth-century Gibraltar, male British politicians were commemorated in this way: Winston Churchill Avenue, Sir Herbert Miles Road, Dudley Ward Way. In the later twentieth century the streetname as act of social justice came into being, e.g. Mandela Close, London Borough of Brent, 1981, commemorating the African nationalist resistance-fighter Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned at the time. The naming of streets as an act of social justice is not representational space naming as it does not spring from community usage, but neither is it an uncomplicated representation of space naming as it is often bestowed by local officialdom in opposition to the party in power – in the case of Mandela Close, Brent, by the Labour Party; and in the case of Avenida de 8 de Marzo in Salburua, by the Mayor, a member of the Basque Nationalist Party. We return to streetnaming as act of restitutional social justice in Section 4.

2.1 Historical context of Gibraltar’s bilingual streetnames

The Rock of Gibraltar was known in antiquity as Mons Calpe, one of the two pillars of Hercules. It is a Jurassic limestone promontory, just under half a kilometre in height (426 m), tapering on its Western side where the majority of inhabitants have always resided. The name Gibraltar derives from Jabal (‘mount’) Ṭāriq, honouring Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād who captured the peninsula in 711. The first permanent settlement was built by Moors in the twelfth century. Control passed back and forth between the Moors and various Spanish kingdoms until 1462, when Gibraltar was conclusively captured, becoming part of the now-united Kingdom of Spain in 1501 (Finlayson et al. 2024: 193, 281).

The transition to British rule was heralded by the Anglo-Dutch annexation of Gibraltar in August 1704 and legalized in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. British rule represented an abrupt severing of the Rock’s socio-political ties with Spain at every level. Owing to anxieties about mistreatment by Anglo-Dutch Protestant troops, nearly the entire population of Spanish Gibraltar – over 5,000 people – departed the Rock upon its annexation, fleeing to the Campo de Gibraltar and leaving just 25 Spanish and Genoese families and their servants, plus a few others and some Catholic clergy (Ballesta Gómez 2007: 157; Constantine 2009: 15).

This was the first time in recorded history that Gibraltar had been definitively cut off from the surrounding region. The word Campo is Spanish for ‘field’ or ‘country(side)’ and indexes the symbiotic relationship between the resource-poor yet fortifiable Rock and its hinterland, where the former Spanish inhabitants grew their food. This contrasts with the nomenclature of military lines which emerged when British Gibraltar became partitioned from the Campo de Gibraltar, which remained under Spanish control. The Spanish military line closest to the Rock was called La Línea de Gibraltar in the eighteenth century, and is now the Spanish town of La Línea de la Concepción.

The built environment required significant reconstruction after its capture in 1704, although its basic design remains intact, as Sanguinetti’s sketched comparison of the old city in 1627 and 1973 demonstrates (Benady 1996: 8). While Gibraltarians overwhelmingly voted to remain British in a sovereignty referendum conducted in 1967 (99.64 %), they nevertheless fold their history into the Rock’s longer chronicle of habitation: General Franco’s hermetic sealing of Gibraltar in 1969 was known locally as the fifteenth siege, in a long line that stretches back to Moorish attempts to fend off Castilian forces in the fourteenth century (the first siege), as well as the equally unsuccessful attempt to repel the Anglo-Dutch invasion force in 1704 (the eleventh siege).^[5]

The bilingual streetname system began to emerge after the Anglo-Dutch annexation, with some variants preserved through cultural memory (see Figure 1). (Spanish Gibraltar was itself a superimposition on its Moorish antecedent: the Spanish name for the district surrounding the central thoroughfare was La Turba, perhaps from Arabic Turba al-Hamra ‘red soil’ (Benady 1996: 10).) English and non-English vernacular variants (Spanish, Genoese, Menorcan Catalan, Sephardic Jewish Haketian) would have emerged and fallen out of use over time.^[6] Figure 2 is one such example with referential disjunction.

Figure 1:

Example of a street with variants established in the respective British and Spanish eras of sovereignty.

Figure 2:

Example of referential disjunction between a streetname’s English and Llanito variants.

Streetnames express the orography of the Rock, with generics ramp, steps, hill and specifics upper, lower, top of conveying degrees of verticality in English, and cuesta, escalera, arriba correspondingly in Llanito. Such generics contrast with the names given to streets built on land reclaimed from the sea throughout the twentieth century which have no traditional variants: a foreshadowing of the loss of historical multilingualism (for which, see Section 4).

3 Sources of evidence for Gibraltar’s streetnames

Our data is gleaned from the Gibraltar National Archives censuses. In Section 2.1 we present Gibraltar’s historic English streetnames by their generic elements, a process we then repeat for Llanito.^[9] Appendix 1 is a parallel list of streetnames in their English and Llanito variants, while Appendix 2 relates these streetnames to the family names of Gibraltar residents 1704–1834.

4 The wider Western Mediterranean context

Gibraltarian streetnames bespeak a spatial practice of the journeys around the Western Mediterranean forts undertaken by family members over numerous generations. However, we look in vain for streetnames reflecting this spatial practice in other eighteenth-century fort locations such as Ceuta, Melilla, Menorca or Malta, as streetnames there have largely been modernized. Only Gibraltar now retains this archaeological trace. Nevertheless, family names recorded in Gibraltar’s streets continue on in these places: there are still people named Ansaldo, Risso and Parodi in Genoa; Carreras, Cardona and Giró in Menorca; although subsequent generations named Benoliel, Benzimra, Serfaty, Serruya left Morroco due to worsening conditions there for Jews. Twenty-five kilometres away across the Straits lies Ceuta, another exclave fort on a peninsula connected to a foreign mainland by an isthmus. Ceuta has been owned by Spain since 1668 (Kirschen 2014: 6) and is joined to Morocco. Eighteenth-century plans of Ceuta are labelled with vocabulary similar to that of Gibraltar.^[19] Generic and specific streetname elements in modern Ceuta are also comparable with Llanito variants though they do not contain the same degree of personal names, as shown in Table 5.

Gómez Barceló (1995: 300, 308) has surveyed the historic streetnames of Ceuta in archive records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They either referenced built features, such as the walls of the fortification, churches, gunpowder stores and barbican, or were navigational: Rúa que va para las Vendederas desde la Plaza; Rúa que va para la Aduana. As Ceuta had previously been owned by the Portuguese, early streetnames contained Portuguese personal names. Modern Ceuta streetnames comprise surnames that match those in Gibraltar’s early censuses: Calle Benali, Calle Benasayag, Calle/Pasaje Bentolila, Patio Hachuel, Callejon Martín Cebollino, Calle Mohamed Hamed Abderrahaman – as do the streets in nearby Tetouan named Abuderham, Benzaquen, Cazes (Ortega 1917: 278, 280). Modern Ceuta’s politicians also use streetnames as a locus of restitutional social justice – Ceuta too has its Plaza de Nelson Mandela. Gómez Barceló (2014: 266–267) reports that on 27 November 2008, the Ceuta Assembly commemorated through streetnames local citizens: José Alfón Benoliel (cf. Gibraltar’s Benoliel’s Passage, Escalera de Benoliel; the name Benoliel is recorded in Gibraltar’s census records in 1777); Fortunato Bendaham Abecasis, who was executed by the Francoist government in 1937 (cf. Gibraltar’s Abecasis Passage; Bendaham recorded in 1784 and Abecasis in 1774 in Gibraltar’s records); and Moisés Benhamú Benzaquén, who was executed by the Francoist government in 1937 (both names recorded in Gibraltar’s records in 1777).^[20] The Assembly also honoured by streetname Menahem Gabizón Benhamu (Gabizon recorded in 1784 in Gibraltar’s records), and José Benoliel Bentata (Bentata recorded in 1819 in Gibraltar’s records). Thus streetnames both sides of the Straits honour members of the same families.

Like Gibraltar, the language of Ceuta’s garrison, Spanish, differs from that of its hinterland, where Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and Tamazight (Berber) are spoken. As in Gibraltar, present-day Ceuta street signage is in the language of the fort rather than the language of the mainland. Unlike Gibraltar, this is contentious because use of monolingual Spanish serves to background the Muslim population (González Enríquez 2007: 12). Fernández García, who has investigated present-day language use in both Ceuta and Melilla, reports that there are no historic streetnames in Arabic or Berber that preserve an oral streetnaming culture like Gibraltar’s.^[21] Melilla’s fort lies 145 nautical miles away from Gibraltar. It was built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and is also owned by Spain and joined to Morocco. The language of the fort is Spanish, and the language of the hinterland is Tamazight, known in Spanish as Cherja. Historic Melillan Jewish family names that also occur in Gibraltar’s censuses include Benaim, Benhamú, Bensusan, Benzaquén, Chocrón, Hadida (Gómez Barceló 2014: 263).

Gómez Barceló (2007: 104) details how the fleeing Spanish inhabitants of 1704 were replaced by Genoese families, some of whom then travelled on after a time to settle in Ceuta. Genoese families who settled in both Gibraltar and Ceuta include Brusco, Raggio, Risso, Schiaffino (cf. Gibraltar’s Callejon de Risso). Other Genoese settled in Fort St Philip in Menorca, some of whom then travelled on to Gibraltar (Crespo i Sala 2018). Genoese families feature in Gibraltar’s Ansaldo’s Passage/Ramp, Baca’s Passage, Chicardo’s Lane/Passage/Steps, Morello’s Ramp , Callejon de Chiappi, Escalera de Piri, Los Baños de Scotto. Genoa too has a Vico Ansaldo. 571 nautical miles away from Gibraltar lies Menorca, which was under British control for most of the eighteenth century. The Castell de Sant Felip, built by the Spanish, was known in English as Fort St Philip, but its civilian settlement was re-sited in 1771 so its early streetnames are not known (Crespo i Sala 2014a: 169). The Castell de Sant Antoni was built in the seventeenth century and its civilian settlement still exists, but it was retaken by Spain in 1782 and its streetnames were modernized. By 1816, Gibraltar’s civilians counted 2,742 Spaniards, 1,818 Genoese, 1,312 Portuguese, 1,117 Britons, 410 Menorcans (Crespo i Sala 2014a: 173). Gibraltarians from Menorca that feature in Gibraltar streetnames are Solomon Benzimra (Benzimra’s Alley/Lane/Passage/ Pasaje/Callejon), Antonio Cardona (Escalera de Cardona), Sebastian Carreras (Carreras Passage), John Giro (Giro’s Passage), Francisco Sequi (Callejon de Segui).^[22] The Genoese Cardona family, for example, settled in Menorca and Gibraltar (Crespo i Sala 2015: 388). Another group of Catalan-speaking early settlers came from the mainland; one such was the market-gardener Miquel Riera of Sabadell, who features in Gibraltar’s Huerta Riera (Crespo i Sala 2014b: 372). Catalan Bay is a very small settlement at the base of Gibraltar’s steep Eastern side. Finlayson et al. (2024: 60–63) discuss evidence for the origin of this name, concluding that it was bestowed some time between 1622 and 1740, deriving from seasonal fishing there by Catalans. The settlement was built considerably later between 1775–1805, although by 1805 it still consisted of no more than two stone houses with a shed and couple of outhouses. The built settlement seems to have been established by Genoese fishermen, although by 1814 Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and British as well as Genoese and native-born inhabitants are listed as resident.

5 Language shift and the loss of cultural heritage in contemporary Gibraltar

Gibraltarians are presently in the process of a language shift towards English, with knowledge of Llanito in steep decline among the youngest generation (Canessa 2019; Enriles 1992; Kellerman 2001; Levey 2008: 58; Weston 2013). Canessa (2019: 8) reports that only a minority of Gibraltarians now speak Llanito to their children. As a result, the Llanito streetname variants are falling into disuse, eradicating a system that has existed for over three hundred years. This is not a conscious act of forgetting, nor a deliberate disinheritance. The siege warfare of the eighteenth century eventually gave way to a more peaceful relationship between Spain and Gibraltar, and helped the latter to become a prosperous civil mercantile society. This was facilitated by the influx of Spanish brides, who instigated the hispanicisation of Llanito (Weston 2011). While a common language undoubtedly helped bring together the ancestrally-disparate nations of this new civil society, Gibraltarians remained keenly aware that Gibraltar was more affluent than its Spanish campo, and that this affluence was based – authoritarian caprice notwithstanding – on British sovereignty. As such, the mutual dependence that existed between the garrison and the population perdured. Yet despite the prevailing use of Llanito in the nineteenth century, we find a disavowal of Gibraltar’s Spanish ancestry. W. H. Rule, a resident British missionary and educator, wrote in 1844 that “there is an unchristian prejudice among many persons against all that is Spanish, of which the natives themselves unhappy partake” (Rule 1844: 367). Richard Thomsett, a British naval officer, referred to two classes of Gibraltarian, the first “a polite English speaking person … the shop-keeper of Gibraltar” and the second “who knows but a few words in broken English … yet he loves to be thought English” (Thomsett 1890/1999: 74).

At the start of the twentieth century, only the social elite of the colony were bilingual in Llanito and English (Kellerman 2001; Weston 2011). The marriage patterns that had prevailed throughout the nineteenth century continued into the early twentieth, reinforcing the use of Llanito among Gibraltar’s residents. In 1944, Professor Hayek of the London School of Economics reported that “a very high proportion of Gibraltarian men marry Spanish women … who usually speak no English at all” (quoted in Benady 2000: 135). Stockey (2019: 166, citing John Pau) explains this trend with reference to the relative prosperity of Gibraltar, which attracted “girls over the other side of the border who wanted to improve their lot”. It is unclear, however, whether their new life on the Rock lived up to expectations. As monolingual citizens of a war-torn country traditionally inimical to British Gibraltar, they were disadvantaged in multiple ways in a territory where the garrison elite were typically male, English-speaking and British. The intersectional disadvantages experienced by Spanish women may help to explain why, even today, Gibraltarians disavow the Spanish ancestry of their foremothers, who “have been erased from official and person(al) historical consciousness” (Canessa 2019: 20–21). What is also clear, however, is that life on the Rock during the twentieth century proved to be a transformative experience, for them and particularly their children and grandchildren.

By the end of the century, Kellerman (2001: 92) notes that “through a striking process of partial language shift … Gibraltar’s predominantly monolingual Spanish-speaking classes became bilingual”. This shift can be attributed to four consequential events, which collectively convinced Gibraltarians that Britain was its future, and the language they needed for that future was English. These were the resumption of the old antagonisms of Spain following the Francoist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939); the evacuation of Gibraltar’s women and children to English-speaking territories during World War Two (1940); the post-war revitalization of the housing stock and education system, emphasizing knowledge of English (Archer and Traverso 2004); and Franco’s sealing of the border from 1969 to 1985. The first of these events led directly to an influx of between 5,000–10,000 Spanish refugees, depending on sources.^[23] While only a minority of these monolingual Spanish speakers were permitted to remain, the Spanish regime became an object of hatred for Gibraltarians. During World War Two, women and children were evacuated to London, Madeira and Jamaica, where their knowledge of English dramatically improved. A civil servant visiting an English school of Gibraltarians noted “Two years ago they knew no word of English; now they prattle bilingually” (Finlayson 1990: 94). These linguistic gains were further consolidated in two ways when Gibraltarians returned to the Rock. First, Gibraltarians adopted an anglophone education system modelled on Britain’s. Second, land reclamation allowed for new housing blocks to be built, which dispersed the multigenerational dwellings and patios that otherwise served to maintain the use of Spanish (Weston 2013: 260). The conditions for language shift towards English were then speeded by the border closure, when “Gibraltarians’ only link with the outside world being travel by air to London … inevitably strengthened their ties with Britain in every way” (Garcia 1994: 157). Weston (2013) demonstrates that the border closure was a sociolinguistic watershed, when many Gibraltarians started to speak to their children in English at home.

Events that brought about a partial language shift towards Llanito-English bilingualism in the twentieth century (2001) are also responsible for a shift towards monolingual English in the twenty-first. Weston (2011, 2015) and Suárez-Gomez (2020) capture this shift through the lens of Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model of Postcolonial English, and Buschfeld and Kautzsch’s (2017) Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces Model, respectively. While Kellerman points to the focusing of a local Gibraltarian accent, Enriles (1992) demonstrates how this local variety is also losing Spanish-contact features and moving towards a Southern Standard British English norm. This shift is apparent not just to linguists, but to Gibraltarians themselves, many of whom regret the loss of the cultural and linguistic “privilege of living and being bilingual” (Weston 2013: 6). This process of language shift is not yet one of wholesale replacement of Llanito by monolingual English. Rather codeswitching, long practised on the Rock since the period of British sovereignty, now demonstrates ratios increasingly dominated by English (Rodríguez García 2024; Weston 2013: 6).

As is apparent from Tables 3 and 4, irrespective of whether the streetname generics are from English or Llanito, the specifics are from a range of languages, as has been the case since 1704. Multilingualism and language mixing has long been Gibraltar’s norm. What is new is the lack of replenishment of Spanish from the Campo de Gibraltar into the home. Buchstaller et al. (2023: 6) observe that “the citytext, and especially the memorialisation therein, is interpreted as the selective memory of a society”, and “the sedimented citytext is a palimpsest of, sometimes antithetical, versions of history, none of which are ideologically neutral” (2023: 12). This lack of replenishment of Spanish from the Campo de Gibraltar means that the memory of Gibraltar’s streetscape is becoming even more selective. Aware of this impending break in the transmission of Llanito, the Gibraltar Ministry for Traffic, Transport and Technical Services has recently positioned Gibraltar Heritage plaques adjacent to eleven streetsigns, explaining “local colloquial heritage regarding Gibraltar’s old street names”, not for the benefit of Gibraltarians, however, but tourists.^[24] This is a representation of space acknowledgement of the social value of the Llanito variants (although only some of those plaques contain Llanito). As observed in Section 1, bilingual streetsigns proclaim identity, and Llanito variants convey and transmit identity just as much as the English variants. Nevertheless Smith and Akagawa (2009: 4) make the point that it is often theatrical examples of intangible cultural heritage that fit Western preconceptions of what heritage is. By contrast, something as mundane as a Llanito streetname passes unnoticed.

6 Conclusions

The analysis of streetnames and surnames presented here is a demonstration of lexical sociolinguistics. The argument is based on a survey of the historic onomasiological set, and on applying the concept of communities of spatial practice, which merges the community of practice (the civilian fort-servicers) and their spatial practice mobility (fort-servicing as a motivation for migration around the Western Mediterranean forts). The economic attraction of providing services to the garrison caused people to move to Gibraltar, which was a node in a fort-servicing network, with the concomitant effect of lexemes passing from surnames to streetnames over generations. We have examined the social value of the onomasiological set of streetnames and what would be lost if the Llanito variants were abandoned altogether. We have drawn attention to the unique properties of Gibraltar’s streetname assemblage: (a) the inclusion of the names of eighteenth-century Western Mediterranean fort-servicing personnel, (b) the oral preservation until recent times of Llanito variants, some with proximal affect not encoded in English variants, (c) the unusual referential disjunction between English and Llanito variants, and (d) the preservation of a density of eighteenth-century fort-vocabulary of ramps and fronts, parades and ranges, walls, barracks, bomb-house and bastions. Gibraltar’s half-written, half-oral personal-name streetname assemblage records a cohesive core of eighteenth-century families whose settlement seeded the stability of Gibraltar’s civilian population, whose descendants continue to bear their names in Gibraltar today. Although the legitimacy of the Gibraltarian identity has been challenged by successive Spanish governments, this unbroken lineage is testament to the generational spatial practice of civilian residents. We asked whether this has any relevance for present-day Gibraltarians. We suggest that it does, being relevant to personal ancestry, identity and belonging. We have questioned what would be lost if the Llanito variants were forgotten, and concluded that their loss equates to a loss of cultural heritage.^[25] Gender is implicated, heritage plaques notwithstanding, as Llanito has largely been maintained and replenished by the female line due to an economic imbalance between’ Gibraltarian men and Spanish women. Its loss can be equated with a termination of the historic female voice, the result of a “profound ambivalence towards Spanish, the language of mothers (and grandmothers)” (Canessa 2019: 8).