Language shame (3)

How refreshing to hear a foreigner say that Maltese is beautiful (The Sunday Times, January 15)! The operative word in Inga Boissevain's message is 'identity'.

As Ms Boissevain rightly wrote, Maltese children who were deprived of acquiring a mastery of Maltese, never really acquired a good grasp of other languages, including English. It's a fact well researched by linguists, that learning the mechanics of one's language to a high degree puts you in good stead to acquire other languages and improve, with persistence, to a near native level.

Our own British lecturers at the teachers' training colleges in the late Sixties and early Seventies were always pleased to announce that they themselves couldn't improve upon the level of English attained by quite a few of us. And surprise, surprise, they were referring to a few of us whose parents were working class and frequently semi-literate, and who always spoke Maltese at home and in the schoolyards.

I learnt enough about second and other language acquisition to ensure that both my children were brought up bilingual, who did extremely well at school when they studied a third, and one of them a fourth language, as diverse as English, Maltese, French and Mandarin, which is no mean feat in this far-flung corner of the world.

I shudder to think what they could have missed out on, if I had not gone against the trend here to forget about teaching them Maltese as "it's a useless language".

Both children, now adults, are all the more enriched for having learnt Maltese. But to deprive Maltese children, living in Malta, of their own native language to the highest level they can attain is unforgivable, as it will also impede their learning of other languages to an accomplished level.