ABSTRACT
There are possibly more studies on code-switching between Spanish and English than on any other pair of languages—most of them on bilingual speakers in the USA with a Latino background (Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, etc.). In fact important earlier studies on the sociolinguistics of code-switching such as Gumperz and Hernández-Chavez (1971), McClure (1977), Pfaff (1979), Poplack (1980) or Zentella (1981) —to cite just a few—refer to this context. Gibraltar offers not only the only possibility of studying societal English-Spanish code-switching in Europe, but also one in which Spanish and English have coexisted for at least 200 years. On the basis of bilingual data from this sociolinguistic context, Melissa Moyer presents a model of conversational code-switching which takes us some steps away from a CA-type sequential analysis of code-switching towards a more ethnographically oriented approach. Her basic argument is that the sequential analysis of code-switching alone does not account for the social significance of this form of bilingual speech.
