The National Council for the Maltese Language (Kunsill Nazzjonali ta' l-Ilsien Malti) has disagreed with comments made by Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech when he announced that the name of the European currency will be written as 'euro' in legal text.
The council noted that on January 17, however, The Times reported Mr Fenech as saying that the government, after consultation with the KNM, had decided that the word 'euro' shall be used in all Maltese legislation "and official documents", though it encouraged the colloquial use of ewro in other circumstances.
The National Euro Changeover Committee (NECC), tasked with overseeing the switch from liri to euro, would use the term 'euro' in its communication campaign.
The council said this differed substantially from what was agreed at a meeting on January 12 when no reference was made to "official documents"; the exception being only "legal texts". The government's preference for ewro was meant to make its use official.
The NECC campaign, addressed by the Maltese government to Maltese citizens, did not in any way qualify as "legal texts", and the committee should therefore make use of ewro, declaredly preferred by the government, the council said.
The council said the government was contradicting itself in arbitrarily choosing 'euro' for its NECC information material while declaring its preference to, and encouragement of, the Maltese form ewro.
"The introduction of the form 'euro' in the Maltese lexicon would constitute a serious arbitrary imposition of a form which is in breach of the orthographical rules of Maltese, on which the government itself has put its seal when it passed the Maltese Language Law only a few months ago," the council said.
It said there was no point in setting up a National Council for the Maltese Language as the sole authority on Maltese, asking for its views and publicly praising its dedication and seriousness, only to scrap its proposals and adopt whosoever's uninformed and whimsical preference at the first occasion.
The council urged the government to clear up this "ambiguous and harmful situation" by speaking out clearly and confirming that it would use the preferred Maltese form ewro in all contexts, with the sole exception of legal texts.