Sandro Mangion

In a rapidly changing, globalised world, the hegemony of the global lingua franca has led languages to open their doors to loan words from English as a means of enriching themselves and, ultimately, of survival.

This is no modern phenomenon. No language would have managed to weather the centuries had it resisted foreign influence. Maltese is no exception, as testified by the interesting blend of vocabulary it has amassed through its exposure to different cultures.

Our media are peppered with strong opinions on the integration into the Maltese orthographic system of the many English loanwords in frequent use. This keen interest goes to show how much Maltese is alive and relevant in our lives. The question is: should we be resorting to English even when perfectly understandable words that have been part of our language for quite some time are available to us? And why does this happen

It is a fact that unless we actively make an effort to read in our mother tongue, we seldom see Maltese written around us in everyday life – just have a look at the products you buy and the signs in public spaces. The sea of written English words we are immersed in means those words are cut and pasted in our memories and, consequently, are the first to come to mind when we need them. Some efforts have already been made to address this situation.

Our bilingual reality is a main element of what makes us who we are

On the initiative of the national council of the Maltese language, for instance, the new Oncology Centre has bilingual signs and directions. The same is the case with the destination signs and ‘next stop’ displays on buses as well as in certain road direction signs.

The Maltese language council has already done a lot to ensure that Maltese remains a convenient communication vehicle for its users. It has carried out wide public consultations and taken important decisions, with others in the pipeline. It offers several courses in Maltese to government personnel and to the public. This sterling work has the government’s support.

A wide public consultation on reforming the Maltese Language Act was held recently, following which a consultative committee was set up to draw up changes aimed at strengthening the council’s authority and effectiveness, for instance, by making its board more widely representative of all stakeholders. Funds for the council have been doubled and, in addition, it has been assigned a second staff member.

In the meantime, the government is investing substantially while supporting initiatives aimed at further strengthening Maltese. For example, by the end of 2016, every class in State-run primary school years 1, 2 and 3 will have received 50 reading books in Maltese and 50 in English. Nine new big books in Maltese have been published as a result of teachers’ hard work, while eight apps/digital books for children are available online free of charge. A website for teachers, malti.skola.edu.mt, offers teaching and learning resources produced by teachers themselves; the Department for Curriculum Management and Mcast have teamed up to produce clips of poems and short stories aimed at secondary school students and the ministry has financed the production of three CDs of Maltese nursery rhymes for schoolchildren.

Such initiatives are coupled with a drive meant to instill the love for reading among our younger generation through programmes such as Aqra Miegħi/Read With Me and the appointment of personalities that children can relate to as Reading Ambassadors.

The Malta Communications Authority, on its part, has helped in the setting up of a Maltese online dictionary.

Being able to communicate and work well in English gives us tremendous political, cultural and economic advantages while Maltese is a crucial part of our national identity and a major way how we express it. Let us keep striving for excellence in both languages. They are both, after all, serving complimentary functions in making our lives better. More than that, our bilingual reality is a main element of what makes us who we are.

Sandro Mangion is a blogger.

Manwel Mifsud

Are we killing the Maltese language? This is perhaps one of the questions that appear most frequently in public debate, often loaded with a reasonable dose of concern and helplessness.

But how real is this danger?

And, if it is, are we doing enough avert it?

People often wonder positively how a tiny vernacular of Arabic managed to survive through the centuries and flourish as an independent national language in the face of the several foreign rulers’ languages.

However, as long as Maltese remained the only means of communication of the monolingual majority of the islanders, the survival of the language was practically guaranteed.

It is only in the last decades, when most of the population has become bilingual to some extent, that the option between using the Maltese and the English language has gradually taken shape and that people are weighing both in terms of their ‘utility’.

While some people readily disqualify Maltese as ‘a language that will not get you farther than the breakwater’, others – perhaps with a keener insight – point to other qualities of Maltese which are less evident but equally real, such as identity and a sense of belonging.

A nation that respects itself respects its language

Language is important for communication and for the national ethos; a modern State, therefore, needs to have a clear plan for language use in the public sphere. This is even more important in a country with two official languages.

Language policy normally embraces two dimensions: the status (the extent of the presence of a language in the social and political environment) and the corpus (the level of academic discipline to which it has been subjected to become an effective social communication tool).

I’m afraid that, unfortunately, we still lag behind other European languages on both fronts.

One important development that occurred in status planning was the institution of the Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Ilsien Malti.

For the last 11 years, this council has worked hard to normalise the language and its efforts have been beneficial in the promotion of Maltese in those national fora where it was generally disregarded.

However, the major task of working out a language policy for Malta still looms on its horizon. It is with satisfaction noting that, since a few years, the Ministry of Education has been lending a helping hand by setting up a board for Language Policy in Education.

As for the corpus, while the Department of Maltese and the Institute of Linguistics at our University as well as the Akkademja tal-Malti and other organisations have kept up their steady work, not enough has been achieved in the sense of reaching out to the public and its linguistic needs.

The Maltese languiage still lacks basic aids such as a good updated grammar, a fully-fledged online dictionary, a spellchecker and courses in public speaking and journalistic Maltese.

The success of some efforts at the more popular level, such as Trevor Zahra’s charming books, the University’s proofreaders course and the evenings of Maltese entertainment Kelma kelma, Nota nota confirm that the Maltese are fond of their language and will respond readily to its charisma.

However, a major handicap in the way of the national language is having a very harmful effect on its development.

Many families are chosing to talk to their younger children only in (some sort of) English, the reasons usually being a mistaken idea of the child’s mental capacity and a deep-seated feeling of inferiority in face of all things foreign, a sentiment that is grossly out of tune with the aims and aspirations of modern European thinking.

This lack of self-esteem is our biggest challenge because its roots are firmly established in our own history.

A nation that respects itself respects its language.

Manwel Mifsud is professor of Maltese at the University of Malta.

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