Valoración de las actitudes lingüísticas en Gibraltar

Abstract

The following Ph.D. is an approach to Gibraltar as a speech community from the point of view of social psychology, our specific research being centred in the discipline of language attitudes. By employing a mentalist view where attitudes are measured through the subjects' perceptions, our aim will be to find out what Gibraltarians will think about their communicative exchanges; which varieties they will use in different situations; with which people they employ these varieties; and what are their feelings when using them.The first chapter is devoted to the historical and sociolinguistic frame of Gibraltar and its Spanish surroundings. A detailed study on its idiosyncrasy and inner history will be a key issue to interpret the results of the survey more accurately.The second chapter consists of two parts, in the first we will revise the linguistic references about Gibraltar and we will take as a starting point two studies carried out by two German researchers, Modrey (1998) and Kellermann (2001). In the second, and as a basis for our study, we will make a critical analysis of the theoretical framework of language attitudes. We will use a mentalist view by which attitudes are divided within three components: cognitive, affective and conative, each one being subdivided itself into different dimensions. A questionnaire has been elaborated whose questions measure these three components. Besides this direct-method technique, we have employed an indirect method, the matched guise technique. For the first one, 122 subjects were surveyed and 183 subjects participated in the second one.In the third chapter results will be assessed after a statistical analysis. The following independent variables will be studied: age, sex, level of education, informant's place of birth as well as his/her parents', years lived in Gibraltar and family links with Spain. Significant differences will be found in every single variable.Moreover, this study offers a comparison of Gibraltar with other multilingual communities, taking particular interest in the role bilingualism and code-switching play in these speech communities.