The infamous consonant għ, the silent h and the dragged ie are here to stay, with the council for the Maltese language debunking a myth which occasionally arises that these letters are about to disappear from the alphabet.
“The Kunsill tal-Malti has never discussed, is not discussing and does not have the intention to discuss the removal of these letters,” its president Ray Fabri told this newspaper.
Rumours have surfaced from time to time that the council might decide to do away with these letters but there was increased speculation on social media recently owing to discussions taking place within the body.
However, the only issue the council is discussing is words borrowed from the English language: do we keep kejk, which has been assimilated within the Maltese language – we even have the plural kejkijiet – or write ‘cake’? What about words like ‘roundabout’, for which the language has not yet adopted a Maltese version?
We have been urging people to write more in Maltese
In 1984, the Akkademja tal-Malti had decided to write these words phonetically, as in swiċċ. The same rule stated that if you preferred writing ‘switch’, then this had to be written in italics or inverted commas.
Since the adoption of new words has increased significantly over the years, the council is discussing whether this rule is still valid. Prof. Fabri said this ongoing discussion was the second one since the council’s setting up in 2005 through the Liġi tal-Ilsien Malti.
In the first discussion, concluded in 2008, the council had issued an alphabetical list of words in which a final decision was taken on orthographic variants of the same word, such as Awwissu and Awissu, filgħodu and fil-għodu, with Awwissu and filgħodu making the list.
No changes to the words were made in these 2008 decisions, but a decision was taken on which form to use, Prof. Fabri added.
Meetings were held with teachers and journalists about these decisions, and a three-year moratorium was given, with students only being penalised for using the wrong spelling from 2011. While the second discussion is still going on, the council is in the meantime supporting the development of a Maltese spellchecker, known as ċekkjatur.
Executive director Thomas Pace said the Maltese language was the only European one without a spellchecker and without an updated online dictionary.
“We have been urging people to write more in Maltese, however something that makes people choose English over Maltese when writing on a screen is a spellchecker. People feel more comfortable writing in English knowing their orthography is being automatically checked,” he noted.
The spellchecker is being developed by a private company in collaboration with the council and the government’s IT agency Mita.
The first set of decisions can be found here .