Recently, I read a letter from a reader complaining about the mispronunciation of one word used regularly on a major radio station. If one word badly pronounced troubles him, the rest of this letter will offer him no comfort.

We Maltese tend to close our mouths when pronouncing the last syllable in a lengthy English word, thus compressing our tongue to the roof of our mouth. Thus, words like musical and national end up sounding as musikill and nationil. There are numerous other examples.

Another common habit is to pronounce the letter ‘a’ as an ‘e’, as in beg (bag) and kemera (camera). Cheddar cheese becomes ‘Chedder’ cheese and I have also heard Oxford pronounced as Oxferd and Edinburgh as Edinberg, whereas a self-respecting Briton would say Edinbera.

There are too many instances of bad diction and pronunciation to list here. I am bound to say however, that these errors are made mainly by television and radio broadcasters. I remember a time when such media personnel were BBC trained. Nowadays, we just muddle along smugly, complacent that our visual and audio media are a satisfactory educative force.

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