IntroductionGibraltar is a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of Spain which was ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.Today, Gibraltar has a population of approximately 30,000 and the only offi cial language is English ( Levey 2015: 66; Central Intelligence Agency 2016 ).Also widely spoken are Spanish and the local Andalusianbased Spanish variety called Llanito (or Yanito), characterized by extensive codeswitching and lexical borrowing from English (as well as from other languages and dialects; see Kellermann 2001;Levey 2008 ).In this linguistic context, the present study focuses on concepts for which a (traditionally more) British variant and a (traditionally more) American variant coexist.More precisely, we investigate two referentially synonymous expressions that are known, or consistently reported in standard reference works and textbooks, to have diff ered in usage between British English (BrE) and American English (AmE) in the late twentieth century (cf., e.g., Algeo 2006; Krug and S ö nning 2017 for web data).On the basis of n = 312 questionnaires (i.e. a sample of roughly one per cent of the population), we investigate what linguistic choices Gibraltarians make in cases such as lorry vs. truck or parcel vs. package.In order to place Gibraltar with regard to the two major norm-providing varieties of English and in order to identify patterns of variation and change, we compare questionnaire data from Great Britain and the US.Th e status of Gibraltar English (GibE) is special in a number of ways.Gibraltar has been labelled an 'unusual British colony' ( Weston 2015: 647), and attempts at linguistic description have been characterized as suff ering from a 'mismatch between its colonial status and sociolinguistic theory' ( Weston 2011: 339), for example in terms of categorizations of GibE within models of World Englishes (such as Kachru's Concentric Circles Model or Schneider's Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes).While Spanish-English language contact is omnipresent ( Kramer 1998; Su á rez-G ó mez 2012: 1746-8; see also Table 8.2 below), it is clear that GibE does not epitomize what can be considered a typical L2 variety for a number of reasons.First, the vast majority of the current population in Gibraltar speaks English as a fi rst language or can at least be considered highly fl uent (see www.