Some local people find spoken and sung Maltese distasteful, since it is reminiscent of Arabic, while being quite distinct from it in intonation and vocabulary. An Arab can learn how to speak Maltese in six months; a Maltese will take much longer to learn how to speak Arabic. These two languages are not that similar, except mainly for numbers.
Maltese is not only mainly a fixed dialect of Semitic medieval Arabic. It is also to a lesser extent an altered dialect of Romance Sicilian and Italian, with some French and Spanish words thrown in for good measure. Latterly, it has acquired an appreciable and widely adopted English component. It is often seen as a guttural language, like German, but there are ample cases where it features a softness which is unexpected.
Christ and His apostles and St Paul of Tarsus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, equally guttural Semitic languages akin to Arabic and possibly partly Phoenician Maltese, as with Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian, and also Tunisian.
Colonialism has influenced our mentality in having us psychologically discard our local Maltese, and adopt instead the language of our colonial rulers, whether Sicilian, Italian or English. And the Maltese language has been sidelined and denigrated, as the language of a colonised people.
The defence of our Maltese language can continue with recourse to its use in sacred texts, like Saydon’s Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Today an academic knowledge of Maltese is a requirement for admission to the University of Malta.
Some 10 per cent of our Maltese population say they do not speak Maltese, and that they consider it to be an inferior language, inferior to Italian or English that is. And they don’t bother to speak or learn it.
At this stage, I personally admire those Maltese who can speak a sentence in our language without introducing a surfeit of Italian, and now of English words. We can speak whatever language we like, but let’s speak it consistently and correctly. Let us use Maltese numbers regularly once again, as until the 1960s.
We still have a colonial mentality, with a crisis of identity, but in time and with good leaders we shall resolve it. Future generations expect this of us as responsible and informed users of spoken Maltese.