Congratulations and all the best!

Exactly five years ago, Marta joined my team in Spanish Linguistics at the University of Basel. She quickly became a central member of the team and inspired us all with her joy, openness and motivation. In addition to her characteristic and contagious positive charisma, she demonstrated linguistic intuition, analytical skills, an interest in new things, an innovative spirit and the important ability to learn from others and to constantly question and develop herself. Marta joined us in Basel five years ago as a young researcher with little experience – and today she leaves us as an outstanding specialist in language contact and an established reference for the linguistic situation in Gibraltar.

In her dissertation, Marta examined the language use of young Gibraltarians from a structural, pragmatic and discursive perspective. She was able to demonstrate the multi-layered significance of English-Spanish language contact for this generation and, in particular, describe the identity-related significance of the contact variety Yanito. Her work is groundbreaking and innovative both theoretically and methodologically – it will undoubtedly have a lasting positive influence on further linguistic work on Gibraltar. My warmest congratulations to Marta on this great success!

For her postdoctoral project, Marta is now moving to the Institute of Hispanic Language and Literatures at the University of Bern and will investigate multilingualism in Swiss schools with a focus on the preservation of heritage languages and dealing with multilingualism in the classroom. I wish Marta all the best for her academic and personal future and thank her for the wonderful collaboration over the last five years!