Walter Finch
THE border between Spain and Gibraltar reopened 40 years ago last week, after 16 long years of Spanish dictator General Franco’s efforts to punish Gibraltarians into becoming Spanish.
His plans backfired spectacularly, however, and led to a reordering of Gibraltar society starting with its dominant tongue, according to Gibraltar’s Environment Minister John Cortes.
In an exclusive interview with the Olive Press, Cortes said that Franco’s decision to seal the frontier in 1969 was the dramatic catalyst for the marginalisation of the Rock’s once-dominant Spanish tongue.
Franco’s decision to punish Gibraltarians and lock them out from the mainland ‘had the opposite effect to what he wanted,’ Minister John Cortes told the Olive Press.
“It didn’t convince people to join Spain, it actually pushed them away. And that was reflected in the language,” the trained biologist said.
Sixteen years of isolation from Spain, with economic hardship and the separation of friends and families, saw tremendous realignments in Gibraltar society, not least of all in the way people spoke.
According to Cortes, 68, he would get ‘whacked with a leather strap by a Christian brother’ if he spoke a word of Spanish in primary school.
This was because Spanish used to be the first language spoken at home of many Gibraltarians, and so English was strictly enforced as the language of education and business.
“There was a taboo about speaking Spanish in school,” Cortes said, before hastily adding that it was never persecuted more broadly in the way that, say, Catalan was under Franco.
But the border closure made it virtually impossible for a generation of Gibraltarians to intermarry with their Spanish neighbours.
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“It meant fewer Gibraltarians have Spanish grandparents, and even fewer have a Spanish parent, so simply put less Spanish is spoken,” Cortes reflected.
Meanwhile, anti-Spanish sentiment saw people switching to English-language television, while an influx of Brits and other foreigners further diluted the Spanish tongue.
The final nail in Spanish’s coffin, for Cortes, so to speak, was the scholarship system to British universities the Gibraltar government offers to youngsters – ‘so we are all educated in England’.
These series of factors led to the linguistic pendulum swinging inexorably away from Spanish towards English, as Gibraltar has become more anglicised than ever.
“We are much more British today than we’ve ever been in the past,” Cortes concluded.
