Presence of linguistic features characteristic of heritage languages in the written productions of bilingual speakers in Gibraltar

Abstract

In this paper, within the framework of the fields of linguistics applied to language teaching, bilingualism, and language contact, the written productions of 40 bilingual speakers of English and Spanish in Gibraltar will be analysed in order to find some of the linguistic features commonly associated to heritage languages. In this British overseas territory, English –which is the only official language and the language of instruction in schools– comes into contact with Spanish, acquired orally at home by part of its population, and learnt as a foreign language at school. The informants, who were attending the last year of Secondary Education in a comprehensive school in Gibraltar, were administered a lexical availability test. The results show the presence in Spanish of some special characteristics related to heritage speakers' linguistic repertoire, such as the lack of gender and number agreement, the wrong assignment of gender to nouns, the incorrect use of prepositions, and the overuse of semantic and syntactic calques due to literal translation from English.