The Department of Maltese at the University of Malta refers to the consultation exercise on the Maltese language launched by the Ministry for Education and Work and to the recent piece by Henry Frendo (July 12).
The department is required by law to recommend to the Minister of Education the person(s) most suitable for the position of president of the National Council for the Maltese Language. It is also required to propose persons for the respective chairs of the council’s technical committees.
We, the undersigned, unanimously confirm our faith in the council’s appointed president and its technical committees, whose advice on Maltese language has always rested on expert knowledge of linguistic criteria and a sensitive discernment of the growing contexts and varieties of Maltese, thereby guarding against impressionistic and uninformed opinions on our national language.
The members of the Department of Maltese also wish to express their concern regarding any planned change in the cultural, academic and governmental representation on this council, especially if this change means an undermining of its present standards of linguistic analysis and recommendations.
In the consultation process, an important distinction should have been made between the fact that a national language belongs to all its native speakers and the learned principle that linguists remain best equipped to study the inherited rules of that language in relation to the changing scenarios of its usage.
The ongoing standardisation of written and spoken Maltese will continue to generate debate, especially as far as English loanwords are concerned. However, such issues hardly reflect the council’s tireless efforts to find a reasonable balance between our language’s received grammar and its newly-emerging trends. The council has inherited grammatical and writing rules that no longer cover the whole broadened context of contemporary usages of Maltese. Besides, the issues surrounding borrowed words hardly represent the council’s much wider spectrum of achievements.
The following are but a few of the council’s successful projects: the extensive work on place names and on the Maltese version of various bilingual road signs; the development of the Maltese version of electronic displays for the public transport system; the numerous courses in Maltese offered to teachers, social workers and the Malta Arts Council officials; the bilingual signs produced for the new Oncology Department; the numerous ongoing meetings with parents, grandparents and teachers; the 10-year successful running of the course in proofreading Maltese in collaboration with the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta; the daily consultation services to the PBS for the correct use of written Maltese in news crawlers; the publication of three geography books in Maltese for State schools (Forms 3, 4, and 5); the publication of the de Soldanis dictionary (in print); the publication of books dedicated to specialised registers, such as Ballun Pinġut (in collaboration with Għaqda Ġurnalisti Sports and the Department of Maltese); the production of children’s nursery rhymes on the Department of Education’s website (malti.skola.edu.mt) and on YouTube channel ilsien pajjiżi; the development of any number of teaching aids; the official support for an electronic spellchecker and a national online Maltese dictionary etc.
These accomplishments have won public and institutional support from many sectors of society. To try and reduce the council’s hard work to a relatively small number of spelling issues is to create a partial and unmerited picture of its admirable achievements.
To suggest the council has been deciding issues without following conventional linguistic trends or native speaker tendencies, or even public opinion, is just as misleading since the issues have only arisen because the Council has taken care to take into consideration not just the received rule, nor the native speaker’s intuitions, but also the flourishing areas of specialised and technical usages of Maltese. To state the conflict between varieties of Maltese has been brought on by the council (because it points out these usages as they evolve) is, quite simply, a fabrication. The members of the department unanimously wish the council a continued success in its good work. All the department’s members have endorsed this letter.
This Talking Point is signed by Bernard Micallef, Manwel Mifsud, Oliver Friggieri, Albert Borg, Arnold Cassola, Adrian Grima, George Farrugia and Olvin Vella, from the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta.