We’ve just read the unsurprising news that loads of students are flunking their Maltese exams, and as usual there is the gnashing of teeth and hand-wringing that accompanies such announcements. When faced with reports that 26 per cent of students sitting for their ordinary level Maltese exam, failed this year, the assorted army of armchair critics, keyboard warriors and part-time literacy specialists swarmed online to tell us why exactly there was this decline in standards and why we were going to hell in a handcart language-wise.
There was a lot of moaning about the notoriously difficult ‘għ’ and ‘h’. Students couldn’t be expected to know where to place them, could they?
The Akkademja tal-Malti came in for some flak for giving official recognition to gems such as ‘rawndebawt’ and ‘ħendawt’. According to the purists, this is where the rot set in, and when students started to spell in any which way they felt like.
Other commenters pinned the blame for awful spelling on textese. Why faff around with correct spelling when you can communicate so much more succintly, sending messages of the ‘C U 2nite @ 8. TTFN’ – variety?
And after getting used to this ultra-short hand method of communicating, it’s going to be rather difficult to switch back to a more formal mode of communicating where vowels occasionally show up and which is not only punctuated by the horrendously over-used exclamation mark.
Then there were those commenters who said they couldn’t care less if students couldn’t write Maltese for toffee and who looked around cluelessly when someone addressed them in Maltese. According to these people, it’s perfectly acceptable not to understand more than a few words of your mother tongue, because being fluent in English is far more important. I really have no truck with these people. Granted, English is an international language, the language of the boardroom, of business and technology, and it’s vital to know how to express yourself and communicate well in English.
Learning to read and write in English shouldn’t exclude being bilingual or even learning more than two languages
But why should that be a bar for children learning to speak both English and Maltese fluently and to write both languages reasonably well?
It is so frustrating seeing people with such a defeatist attitude and acting as if their children have a finite number of brain cells, and that learning two languages would be too taxing for their precious poppets.
Learning to read and write in English shouldn’t exclude being bilingual or even learning more than two languages.
When I was growing up, it was taken for granted that we would learn two, three or even four languages. It’s only nowadays that learning more than one language is deemed to be an unbearable strain and a waste of brain power.
There is another factor that contributes to a poor understanding of Maltese in certain sectors of society. That’s the way some parents bring up their children in an exclusively English-speaking bubble.
They talk to them only in English. If they buy newspapers and books, they’re written in English. They send their children to schools where most lessons are conducted in English.
In the afternoons and on weekends these parents transform themselves into chauffeurs and ferry their children to catechism lessons that are conducted in English. These may be impractical and far away from the local parish hall close by, but at least their children are spared from hearing a word or two in Maltese.
These children get practically no exposure to Maltese. Without realising it, their parents are transmitting their dislike for their mother tongue to their children. So it shouldn’t come as some big surprise when their children feel as if Maltese is an alien language to them – it is.
How are students expected to evince an interest in a language which they have been shielded from since they were toddlers?
Learning Maltese may be tricky for some, but it shouldn’t be made more difficult by parents who don’t allow their children to familiarise themselves with their native language.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt