This project investigates morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes (WEs), focusing on Gibraltar English (GibE), an understudied variety, and incorporating social factors as key predictors of linguistic variation. To this end, three open-access GibE corpora will be compiled: the spoken component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GBR), the Spoken Corpus of Gibraltar English (SGibE) representing media language, and the Corpus of Gibraltar Press (GibPress), which includes written data from newspapers. Contrastive analyses will compare GibE with African, Asian, and Caribbean Englishes to explore how cognitive, sociolinguistic, and situational factors shape variation and to identify GibE-specific patterns that diverge from broader WE trends. The study also examines social influences such as language attitudes, social networks, and language entropy within the context of Gibraltar’s ongoing shift from multilingualism to English monolingualism. This sociolinguistic transformation, marked by differences between younger monolingual and older multilingual speakers, is hypothesized to influence both morphosyntactic patterns and language attitudes. To explore these dynamics, the project will use questionnaires, interviews, matched-guise tests, and corpus-based qualitative analyses. Grounded in Usage-Based Theory and the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces (EIF) Model, it aims to advance our understanding of Socio-Syntax and contribute to broader theories of language contact and variation.
