The two halves which make us whole
Recently cognitive scientists have posited that memories can only be formed after language. So I often wonder what they’d make of Gibraltarians who speak in a forked tongue, flickering between English and Spanish neither here nor there it falls just short of a language and is instead relegated to that linguistic purgatory, that space between languages; a dialect. Suitable ambiguity. Llanito we call it.
I wonder if because of this they’d consider our memories half formulated. How do memories built on the loose foundations of a dialect develop? In our case, not very well. To the Spanish Llanito is too English and to the English it’s too Spanish; two halves which leave a hole, they’re incompatible so that at best we’re half complete, as a result our voices get caught in our throats and our history is passed down through whispers.
We’ve betrayed our mother tongue, we haven’t looked after her and in return she has refused to nurture us. Of course, memories can’t be consolidated without a language to celebrate them, to share them in, or to scream them with.
I feel it myself, my tongue which spoke of home is now tongue tied. When I consider my language divided, I consider my home divided, my own memories foreign. I consider my own traits as borrowed from England and Spain before I consider them as Gibraltarian, before I remember that we are not an island but instead a bridge marrying two halves, two halves which make us whole.