Years ago, riding my bike down Utrechtestraat in Amsterdam, I came to halt having heard something I did not expect to hear. Something I hadn’t heard in a while and did not expect to encounter in Rembrandtplein. It was unmistakable and instantly recognisable; a language I and only a mere half million other people can speak. It was Maltese.
Maltese tourists in Amsterdam are hardly remarkable, but when one comes from such a small country, the sound of your countrymen tends to fill you with excitement rather than dismay. My serendipitous encounter made me feel happy to be part of such an exclusive club, a speaker of a linguistic gem of a language.
Maltese is itself unexpected. A semitic language that survived the 11th century Christian reconquest of southern Europe. For most of nine centuries, the language was not taught in schools, used in courts or even written down. Not the Norman French of the reconquerors, the Spanish that presided over the islands for centuries, the various Romance languages of the crusaders or even English was able to defeat Maltese. Unlike other non-sovereign languages in Europe like Welsh, Irish, Basque, Catalan, Occitan, Frisian and Swabian to name just a few, Maltese did not substantially decline and retained its semitic character.
However, since Maltese became a sovereign language, substantial concerns for its survival have emerged. Unfounded concerns, as the language’s ability to survive is clear, and these concerns have resulted in damaging policy actions by the government. Resources have been diverted to this culture war to rename streets and change road signs, with foreigners unsure how to get to Valletta and Gozo (now labeled Il-Belt and Għawdex) and locals not needing the signage in the first place.
Another salvo in the war against Maltese is the founding of the Maltese Language Council. This shows the conceited ignorance of the state. Here you have language, a beautiful, self-organising, bottom-up phenomenon that thrives if left unregulated. To then impose a top-down order from an all-knowing council is totally ignorant of linguistics and language history and is mired in the conceited belief that they can better steer the language then the speakers themselves. As the French and Germans can tell you, these language councils are at best, a waste of resources and at worst a danger to the vitality of a language. Ask an English speaker, and he might wonder what such a poorly-conceived council even was.
This culture war in favour of Maltese has in its crosshairs our other language, English. English has been so daemonised and marginalised that the level of English in Malta is actually deteriorating. Often, one can find old women who speak English more fluently than their granddaughters. In Spain, Germany, France and Italy, where the inhabitants traditionally speak very poor English, the situation is reversed. Levels of fluency are improving rapidly. In losing our claim to being a native English speaking country, we do great damage to our economy and culture.
English, after all, is not just another language. It just so happens to be the lingua franca of the world. When a Pole and a Portuguese person want to communicate, they will do so in English. There was a time when it would have been French and a time when it would have been Latin, but today it is English. Our ability to speak and write in native English is a coveted prize in this environment. The wealth of resources written in the English language dwarfs not just Maltese, but any other language on the planet. Indeed, more people speak English than any other language.
Will this always be the case? Probably not, but the regional lingua franca shifts only very slowly, and this is the first time in history that there is a global lingua franca. So as the culture war continues and politicians add fuel to the fire to benefit from misplaced nationalism, English is further neglected in favour of Maltese and this economic and cultural advantage over our neighbours further subsides. Losing native access to the that incredible wealth of knowledge will leave us poorer, culturally and fiscally.
Add to this an erroneous fetish of Maltese language purity. Maltese, being cut off from the Semitic world for 900 years lacks a myriad of vocabulary that has been lost or was not needed at the time of our severance. Luckily, the language was able to thrive by co-opting romance words and remarkably even semiticising them. Luckily, no language council was able to prevent this from happening. The turn of the 19th century saw us leave the orbit of the Kingdom of Naples and lose direct contact with Sicilian and Neopolitan speakers. These next 200 years, representing almost a quarter of the time Maltese split from Siculo-Arabic are just as important for the development of the language as the previous 600. English words entering the language and being semiticised are scorned as illegitimate by the purist fetishists. In reality, these words are just as legitimate as the Italian loan words and artificially re-borrowed Arabic inkhorn words that they insist on.
This tendency to reject English borrowings (even if they are 200 years old), championed by the ridiculous council, and to favour Italianate and Semitic words that have never been part of the language, or have fallen entirely out of use, will do Maltese a lot of harm. By insisting that Maltese is written in a specific way, using specific words, the council (if successful) will eventually create two distinct languages. A written language that is as defunct as Latin and written Arabic and hopefully a still living vibrant spoken language outside of their control. These attempts to plow the sea, at taxpayer’s expense, showcase the ignorance and conceit of government intellectuals.
This linguistic nationalism also marginalises the native English speaking minority. These people are 100% Maltese, who happen to have English as their native tongue. Proponents of the culture war tar them as snobs and traitors. While I’m sure, some members of this minority might be guilty of snobbery, even treason, it is still shameful to marginalise the whole lot of them and treat them as foreigners in their own country, despite our constitution.
All this wasted effort in trying to protect a vibrant, living language in no real danger (apart from that posed by bureaucrats) at the expense of a valuable asset that is slipping through our fingers defies belief. Yes, one can be Maltese, and a native English speaker without being a snob. Yes, one can celebrate the amazing linguistic gem that is Maltese without trying to cage the bird and make it sing.
Siġġiewi, 27th August 2018
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| Building a wall around a language will not make it great |
TLDR: Government efforts to favour Maltese over English will harm both languages
