The recently-published Matsec results for Maltese and English are a cause for great worry – to parents, teachers, writers and the schoolchildren themselves.

The news in the papers concentrated more on the bad results in English. This is perfectly understandable because English, as a means of communication throughout the world, is a great resource for Malta. When less than four per cent obtain grade 1 out of over 5,000 students, after 10 years of schooling, it means the vast majority of school-leavers aged 16 or so have no command of the language.

Constitutionally, English has been a second official language in Malta since 1964 and so should it remain. But its continued existence needs protection badly as we are losing it. There is a limit to how many ‘remedial classes’ we can fund even at university level!

However, still more students are failing in Maltese than in English. This is a statement about the inability even to express oneself, in a written form, in one’s own language. That in spite of the life-works of great contributors to the language, such as the late Ġużé Aquilina whose engaging commitment and legacy moulded three generations, who held him in the highest respect. His priceless six-volume dictionary became a foundation stone of legitimacy and stability for our language after a turbulent history.

In recent years, Maltese had stabilised and been accepted, even being used for disciplines such as history and philosophy.

What caused this degeneration? I don’t think this outcome is monocausal. Rather, it is as contextual as it is pedagogical, technological and circumstantial.

Education Minister Evarist Bartolo quite rightly remarked how ironic it was that “in a country with a strong reputation for its English language schools” we were struggling to maintain standards in our own educational system. Remedies are urgently called for.

In its analysis, the Matsec board highlighted, among other things, “rampant misspelling of words”; the use of “slang American diction” and “the persistent use of direct translation from Maltese to English”.

A lack of reading may well be a cause but another very pertinent question is: what is being read and with what spelling?

If the spelling is of a lazy pidgin variety, even ‘proofreading courses’ in the same vein only serve to worsen the situation.

Some such words, for which Maltese had no equivalent, have been internalised in the language over time and became currency. Others, however, remained and remain demonstrably foreign.

This nonsense should be discouraged and prevented by all means if we wish to save both Maltese and English

No amount of attempting to write them phonetically will make them ‘Maltese’ at the batting of an eyelid.

Fiddling around unnecessarily with a language, particularly a very small and very vulnerable one such as Maltese has been and is now more than ever, can cause serious and lasting harm, which will impact negatively on Maltese, as is clearly happening.

If the language has two long-accepted words in current usage conveying different meanings, such as skond (according to) and skont (a discount), to roll them into one is at best confusing and at worst an impoverishment.

People are not interested in how many angels can sit on the pin of some theoretical needle. But they wince when what has always been customary and legitimate is suddenly forcibly rendered ‘wrong’.

However, some Church manuals have even adopted in print the skont version, thereby relegating evangelists to the flea market.

What on earth is the value added in starting to write per eżempju as one word? In which European language to which Maltese had been exposed has such a term been joined into one word?

What is worse must be the negative effect that a misguidedly proposed so-called ‘phoneticisation’ is having on English.

If a student reads spiker in a five-column newspaper spread, s/he may be excused for assuming this were some local version of spiderman. In fact, if and when you digest it, it would be a supposedly ‘Maltese’ rendering of a term used in England for the chairman of the House of Commons. That word is a noun, Speaker, derived from the verb to speak, no spikes attached.

Anyone who listened to the Budget debate on TVM would have noticed MPs generally referring to “Sur President” and not “Sur Spiker”.

If a child reads bajsikil (for rota in Maltese), how are they still to know how to spell the word in English (bicycle, a vehicle with two wheels)? Bajsikil is neither English nor Maltese. It is a pidgin: Maltingliż. Ruinous. Reprehensible. A recipe for illiteracy.

Two practically unintelligible gems I came across in a recent book on Dom Mintoff are bulits (in pidgin) for balal (in Maltese) and bejnit (pidgin) for bajunetta (Maltese).

Nobody occupying any position of responsibility should formally countenance niffollowja rather than insegwi or bejbi instead of tarbija.

For the sake of both languages, this travesty must stop.

Henry Frendo is director of the Institute for Maltese Studies.