Various contributors have expressed concern about the imperfect use of our language. The feeling is natural but one must remember that it is the people who make a language and certainly not the linguist or the politician.
All languages evolve. They shed words and take new ones, and this is an unstoppable process, as the world has become, in the mini-language of today, a “global village”, with ideas and vocabulary to be shared by the user in the course of everyday life. A language which does not have the identical equivalent in lexicography, borrows from another for the common use of its people and is enriched no end. This is a natural process.
There are no new words of indigenous origin in our country. Loanwords are borrowed from the languages of our connections and this is an automatic process which ensures that the islanders express the idea and the word in the way they need to do. It follows as the night the day, that Maltese is being enriched no end and that it is doing so on the fast lane. One can therefore easily understand that loanwords in a language are an exclusive club. If no native word can satisfy the idea in its precise meaning, the loanword becomes a member in view of its commonly needed usage; and, if there is no native alternative, it must, once shared be embraced and given “a local habitation and a name”. This is logical and necessary and we are doing it all the time.
In this light, many European scholars opine that loanwords should be absorbed by the wanting language not merely in the meaning but also in the spelling; as this would facilitate writing and delete clumsiness which is often seen as distasteful, difficult and strange. It is felt that this would do no harm to our tongue, especially so in the field of the technological process and similar areas. Here it is generally considered extremely difficult to reconcile ideas and words newly arrived from beyond the horizon to the semitic nature of our native lexicography, spelling and all.
Examining the linguistic realities of our recent past, one cannot fail to notice the many words and expressions which have been automatically absorbed by Maltese; words like holiday, cooker, queue, goal, computer, bonus, gentleman, bank and a million others. These are Maltese words of foreign origin.
Not merely this, but to boot the English plural, terminated by the letter “s”, has definitely been accepted as an addition to our own plural. An incident I came across recently comes to mind. It is apparently hilarious but elqouent in its linguistic automatic acceptance: an Arriva driver, guarding against excessive patronage on board his bus, was heard yelling at a would-be passenger at a bus stop in Sliema, verbatim, as follows: qed ngħidlek full-up, mhux bil-Malti qed inkellmek! (sic) Evidently, interconnection of languages has made Maltese what it is today.
As happened in other languages, ours seeks the best clarity to convey ideas both in writing and in speaking. One must choose the more attractive and the better known. Clumsiness must be avoided, the more so “invented” words or those which are known to very few, as well as some “howlers” we hear of, pointed out in the media. Regrettably the melting period suffers from the above malady but will end up fine tuned in time; and what appears clumsy today is likely to be accepted tomorrow, in the fluidity of speech. A case in point is the spelling, grammar and meaning in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) where little has remained unchanged both in meaning and in the spelling; all this, via enrichment in the language. At this point in time, to avoid clumsiness one should try to write an idea “in a roundabout way”, if this is possible and if there is no native word equivalent to what one desires to convey. Selection is imperative.
Our country has ceased to be a relatively unknown island and now takes centre stage in the international scenario and it is evident that this change invites quicker evolution of its language. The battle concerning the former island patois was won long ago, but challenges remain. As Malta steers into the new waters of her destiny, ours cannot but stay as the language of the people and if apparently trodden, it can only be trodden into shape, gradually to be enriched along the road of linguistic excellence.
Regrettably, Maltese must remain forever unappreciated beyond our island home, because “only a few hundred thousand people are able to understand the language” and are actually destined to use it.