I was left speechless and shocked by the letter penned by John Zammit (August 8) entitled Is There Need For The Maltese Language? First I find it most out of place that Mr Zammit, living in English-speaking Australia, would write on our media preaching to us what language we should hold as our own and what language we shouldn't but I will leave that matter up to Mr Zammit's judgment.

First I would like to clarify to Mr Zammit that not only am I fluent in English, both spoken and written, just as I am in Maltese, but that in fact during the summer months I actually teach the English language to foreign students. Thus I am well aware of the absolute importance of English in today's world and I am more than aware of the beauty within the English language.

Having said this, I will never betray my mother tongue. I was born in Malta and I'm proud of the fact that an island nation of fewer than 400,000 people has its own language unlike the likes of Australia and the US which have to humbly speak the language of their former colonisers.

Indeed we are a part of Europe, a Europe made up of diverse languages. Go tell the Polish to speak some other language apart from Polish, or the Dutch to speak another language apart from Dutch or any other nation within Europe for that matter. A united Europe does not mean a Europe without diversity but it means unity within diversity.

If Mr Zammit believes that Maltese revolves around the word obbvju then clearly his knowledge of Maltese is just as apt as my knowledge of biochemistry, bearing in mind that I learnt neither chemistry nor biology during my school days.

To confirm his complete lack of knowledge of Maltese and for that matter Italian, Mr Zammit then declares: "The spoken Maltese could at best be only considered as a dialect. Possibly closer to Sicilian. Stop trying to make it a language". If Mr Zammit had even a remote knowledge of Sicilian he would know that while we do share some similarities we are, linguistically speaking, worlds apart. Maltese follows the grammatical bases of Semitic languages with Romance and Anglo-Saxon contributing more vocabulary wise to Maltese than grammatically. This makes Maltese a distinct language as it can be classified as neither a version of Arabic nor a version of Sicilian and definitely not a version of English.

Finally, if Mr Zammit is so ashamed of his Maltese heritage then perhaps he was indeed wise when he went Down Under for his ears not to be burdened by Maltese but only English, albeit in an Australian accent.