This book addresses the complex but little-known language situation in Gibraltar, the small territory which forms a promontory off Southern Spain and which has been British-governed since 1704. The history and geography of the ‘Rock’ have made it a bilingual community, with English as its only official language but Spanish widely used, while Yanito, a mixed variety drawing on both languages, is common in everyday exchanges.

Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the study is reported on in five chapters. Chapter 2 traces the history of Gibraltar, including wars, population movements in and out, changes in religious and political climates. Relevant recent events include the evacuation of the population to English-speaking countries during World War II, Spain's interest in recuperating Gibraltar beginning in the 1950s, and the thirteen-year blockade of the border with Spain which ended in 1982. Chapter 3 describes the methodology used in the study, which focused on 72 Gibraltarians in the age-groups 9–13 and 13–19, from the ethnic groups identified as autochthonous Gibraltarians, Jewish, Indian and Moroccan. The informants were interviewed orally, questioned about their language usage and given reading and translation wordlists. Chapter 4 explores language attitudes and language choice. The author reports that while most Gibraltarians use more than one language in daily life, there is a generational shift towards greater use of English. Many informants use Spanish to their grandparents but English to their siblings, and a clear difference is found even between the two age groups under study here, with more English being spoken by the younger group and more English used to younger than to older siblings. The preference for English was most pronounced among the Jewish and Indian communities, with less English being used by the Moroccans, whose presence is the result of much more recent immigration and who are therefore less integrated. English was also found to dominate the informants' reading and television viewing habits, and contacts with Spain were found to be relatively limited. Chapters 5 and 6 present a phonetic analysis of the informants' pronunciation of English vowels and consonants respectively. While traditionally the English spoken in Gibraltar has been marked by Spanish-type vowel realizations, the study finds that the influence of Spanish is much less pronounced in the English of these younger informants. Their consonant realizations also show a move towards British norms; particularly interesting is the fact that these young informants use realizations such as a glottal stop for the /t/ phoneme and a labiodental or bilabial approximant for the phoneme /r/, which have no counterparts in Spanish but which seem to be imitations of pronunciations common in the UK.

In sum, the book provides various types of evidence pointing to a move among young Gibraltarians towards greater use of English and greater approximation to UK norms, and relates this trend to recent historical and political events, notably the closure of the border with Spain between 1969 and 1982. It is a clearly written, carefully presented study which offers much of interest to sociolinguists.