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

Abstract This article relates Gibraltar’s historic half-oral, half-written bilingual streetname system to its eighteenth-century founding multilingual population. Using the geolinguistic concept of types of mobilities, we demonstrate the existence of communities of spatial practice who serviced forts in Gibraltar, Menorca, Ceuta and Melilla, and who predominantly hailed from Britain, Genoa, Menorca, Morocco and Portugal. We use the term ‘spatial practice’ in the sense that these speakers made recurrent journeys around Western Mediterranean forts over generations, establishing a conduit of language interchange. The linguistic feature studied here is surnames integrated into Gibraltar’s streetnames over a period of time, constituting an archaeological trace of a subset of British Gibraltar’s founding families. Gender is implicated in this account, as the Llanito (the contact variety of Spanish spoken in Gibraltar) streetnames were transmitted by Spanish women who married Gibraltarians, creating Gibraltarian hispanophone domestic environments. These are now in the process of being lost as the older generation has ceased speaking Llanito to children, a consequence of Franco’s closure 1969–1985 of the land-border. This loss of cultural heritage is significant as the concept of a historical Gibraltarian identity is challenged whenever politicians question Gibraltar’s sovereignty. Our analysis demonstrates that the continuity of a cohesive tricentenarian community is audible (if only partially visible) in its bilingual streetscape.