Anthony Licari, after every article that he writes, for some reason or other reminds us that he teaches psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and geolinguistics at the Department of French of the University of Malta.

I carried out some research to find out what exactly it is that Dr Licari so nauseatingly reminds us about at the foot of his articles.

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use and understand language.

Sociolinguistics is a term including the aspects of linguistics applied towards the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations, while geolinguistics is the scientific study of linguistic dialect. It studies variations in language.

Further research also illuminated me to the fact that part of the vocabulary of geolinguistics is the accent, further defined as a characteristic way of pronouncing particular sounds or syllables when speaking a particular dialect.

After having learnt all this, I can finally understand why Dr Licari is so infatuated with Alfred Sant. His performance at the Birzebbuga Labour mass meeting most probably gave him the opportunity to explain to his students the definition in practice of all the above three terms!