“Hace dos años para atrás que fui a Egipto...”: sobre algunas semejanzas entre el español de Gibraltar o yanito y el español de Estados Unidos”

The situation of contact between English and Spanish in the United States bears some resemblance with that of Gibraltar. Significant similarities can be identified both at a sociolinguistic and linguistic as well as discursive level, despite the apparent profound demographic, political, social and cultural differences between the two Spanish-speaking communities. Based on a corpus of compositions written by Gibraltarian adolescents, I analyze a number of structural and discursive features that differentiate Gibraltarian Spanish or Yanito from Andalusian Spanish and that, conversely, are well-documented in the speech of US Spanish transitional bilinguals.