My post yesterday, about the fact that Gibberish may derive from Llanito, prompted Garrett Gibbons to offer us a link to an article he wrote entitled Did 'gibberish' originally describe the speech in Gibraltar (Yanito)? > An Alternative Etymology for Gibberish.
I am much obliged to Garrett for providing us with the link to this very interesting and well argued etymological article on the origins of 'gibberish'. I am also grateful for his interest in Gibraltar generally. Garrett is currently blogging about a Gibraltar Documentary Film project he is in the process of putting together. I very much look forward to viewing it, when it's finished!
Anyhow, this all led me to think some of you may be interested in the following links to discussions on Gibraltar Forums, where our rather unusual, maybe even odd and quirky (for some) Gibraltarian language, Llanito or Yanito, is discussed.
Here are three topics from Gibraltar News Online Discussion Board
Are we 'Llanitos' or 'Yanitos'??
Language/accent
Gibraltarian Bilingualism explained
Panorama Forum
This one may be a bit of a non story. There used to be a very good discussion on the Panorama Forum, on a topic entitled Giannito/Llanito, Dialect, Patois, Gibberish?. Sadly, this link was not working at the time of writing this post.
According to GoDaddy.com, the net domain registrars, the domain xsorbit3.com, which hosted the Panorama Gibraltar Discussion Forum, has not been renewed and is currenly offline!
A note on Panorama's, (one of Gibraltar's daily newspapers with an online presence), discussion page says:
To all users of our Discussion forum
The server which hosts the Discussion forum for Panorama www.xsorbit3.com has gone down.
To date no explanation has been received by us from Xsorbit despite attempts to contact them.
We are sorry for the inconvenience caused but this situation is outside of our control, and we are attempting to find a solution as soon as possible.
This is very sad news, as there were many very interesting topics about Gibraltar on this discussion board. Not least the one I'm referring to here, which had, if I remember rightly... something approaching 20 pages on the subject of Llanito, with many llanito words offered and discussed... and much amusing comment! I really hope this topic (or databse) has not been lost forever! It would be a real shame.
I have found a couple of pages on Google Cache, which are snapshots of how these appeared on 19 Jan 2009 19:44:24 GMT
Google Cache > Giannito/Llanito, Dialect, Patois, Gibberish? > Page 1
Google Cache > Giannito/Llanito, Dialect, Patois, Gibberish? > Page 3
I'm not sure how long Google keeps their cached pages... but they are there for now. Let's hope that Panorama can get those pages back up or somehow, in the hope it's not lost forever, recover that database of some great topics concerning Gibraltar!
In the meantime, I hope anyone interested in the subject of Llanito... can enjoy some of it, as discussed on these links.
For those of you who have no idea what Llanito is... Llanito (pronounced [jɑˈnito] or Yanito is an Andalusian Spanish based vernacular spoken in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. Gibraltarians call ourselves Llanitos.
Llanito consists of an eclectic mix of Andalusian Spanish and British English, marked by a great deal of code switching and loan-words from many other Mediterranean languages. You can read more about Llanito and the Gibraltarian culture on Wikipedia
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