It seems that Education Minister Evarist Bartolo has it in mind to demote the Maltese language from maternal tongue and consequently from its status as national language.

In fact, the Matsec Board is proposing to change the Maltese exams by introducing a new one, “Maltese as a foreign language”.

Nothing wrong in that. Indeed this is an excellent idea... if it is meant for foreigners who are interested in improving their Maltese language skills.

Instead, it seems that this exam will have the same legal standing as the present SEC exam (Level 3) and therefore will be able to substitute for the present Maltese exam, and any Maltese national will be able to sit for Maltese as a foreign language instead.

Imagine the Italians sitting for Italian as a foreign language, the French for French as a foreign language, the Japanese for Japanese as a foreign language, etc. There would be an uproar in those countries.

I am very concerned about the international prestige of our language and the political and economic consequences of such a decision.

As usual, for Joseph Muscat’s government all that counts are numbers... and money generated. And the aim of this exercise is really to disguise the fact that statistics keep showing 30 per cent of our youths do not complete compulsory education.

Rather than addressing this very serious problem, the minister just lowers the levels so he can then boast to the EU that more students are entering into tertiary education. Bartolo simply does not realise this proposal is endangering hundreds of jobs.

When Malta entered the EU in 2004, we caused a great little linguistic revolution in the institutions, having managed to get Maltese recognised as an official language.

I am proud to have been the only elected Maltese politician based in Brussels during the 1999-2004 negotiation period, and to have contributed to the attainment of this status for the Maltese language.

Also a consequence of this recognition, in 2004 Luxembourg created a Permanent Council of the Luxembourg Language, charged with the study, description and spreading of Letzeburgisch, including the elaboration of dictionaries of the language.

The trilingual citizens of Luxembourg are tops in language proficiency. We are only bilingual, yet our performance in language proficiency
is dismal. Why?

The official recognition of the Maltese language caused ripples in Spain, with the Spanish government obliged to take action. On its insistence, in June 2005, the  Council of the EU  decided to authorise limited use at the EU level of languages recognised by Member States other than the official working languages, thus allowing Basque, Catalan/Valencian and Galician to benefit from official EU status.

Ireland was also shaken in its pride because of the official recognition of Maltese. Pressure from the Irish led the EU foreign ministers to take the unanimous decision that Irish Gaelic would be made the 21st official language of the EU.

Ireland and Spain decided to fork out their own money in order to ensure doc-uments could be translated into and debated in, respectively, Gaelic or Catalan/Basque/Galicain, when necessary. We Maltese instead opened up millions of euros worth of jobs for translators, interpreters, proofreaders… without paying a penny.

The minister is now putting the jobs of all these translators, interpreters, proofreaders, etc, at risk with his Matsec proposal, also risking rendering the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Malta irrelevant.

In the EU institutions there is a strong push to save money on languages by eliminating all and just having English, French and German as working languages.

With Bartolo’s proposal that Maltese nationals born and bred in Malta can sit for Maltese as a foreign language, Brussels will simply say ‘thank you’: “If you Maltese consider the Maltese language to be a foreign language for your citizens, then there is no need for us in Brussels to consider Maltese (after all, spoken by only 400,000 people) an official language of the EU. Thanks for saving us millions of euros every year.”

Apart from the jobs lost, the prestige of our language will go to the dogs. The Maltese authorities have got to go to the crux of the problem: why are Maltese students failing to complete compulsory courses in such big numbers?

You do not solve the problem by lowering the standards and pretending that now more students are passing exams.

You solve the problem by looking at successful examples in other countries. We are a bilingual nation. Luxembourg is trilingual (all students start learning Letzeburgisch, then German, then French). An EU Commission 2012 survey showed that the inhabitants of Luxembourg are number one in the EU as regards language, speaking an average of 3.6 languages each.

Despite being trilingual, citizens of Luxembourg are tops in language proficiency.

We Maltese are only bilingual, yet our performance in language proficiency is dismal. Why?

Bartolo, rather than demoting our national language and official EU language to “Maltese as a foreign language”, would it not be better to examine how the trilingual system in Luxembourg is so successful and how our bilingual one is returning such dismal results?

Arnold Cassola is former Alternattiva Demokratika chairman and former secretary general of the European Green Party.

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