For over a year and a half, I have had the privilege of living in Gozo and making an effort to learn the Maltese language. It has helped me worship in the village church with my neighbours, even though I am not Catholic. It has been helpful to me in my volunteer work. Not a day passes when I don’t use the language – in the market or on the street and it is nearly always greeted with surprised warmth. No one in Gozo expects a foreigner to speak Maltese.

Why? Because that has been their experience. Foreigners come, they live here for 10 odd years and can’t speak a word. A prominent foreigner once commented to a journalist that the only phrase she knew, after half a century here, was bongu. A Gozitan friend of mine, reading the article, commented wryly “that’s not even Maltese. That’s French.”

English may be one of the national languages here but it is not the language which has evolved and become the indigenous language, and it is by comparison, a fairly recent acquisition.

I am familiar with the particular conceit which imagines English is spoken everywhere. I used to think that too before I travelled. 40 minutes outside of Zurich, in a picture-postcard village, at a prominent pastry and coffee shop – surely a draw for tourists – not a person there, serving nor waiting to be served, knew a word of English.

A few steps from the large international airport in Rome, at the train terminal, where people from all over Europe buy tickets to destinations all over Europe, and it was impossible to find a cashier who spoke anything but fluent Italian. Swear to God. A smattering of Spanish, French or German – perhaps – but English? No.

In the largest country in South America, in the city of Brasilia, where reside embassies from nations all over the world – stray from the lobby of your five-star hotel, only a block or two, and you will be absolutely lost if you don’t know any Portuguese. English may be the common currency of the trades of business and professions, with all their many facets, but scratch deeper in nearly any country and you will find, it if not the language of vast numbers. Indigenous languages persist as the dominant language and they will continue to persist, as they should. Travellers still travel. That’s part of the adventure.

To reside in another country and never bother to speak the language is to miss out on a great deal and it is to learn absolutely nothing.

If all I had to show for the hours I have passed learning Maltese, was an ability to sing one of the many beautiful hymns that sound within church walls here, I would count it time well spent.

Or if all I had to remember were the surprised smiles on the faces of the people I have met here, when they heard their mother tongue on the lips of a foreigner, it would still be worth the effort.

Make no mistake. These are the things which build bridges.

Sandra Macfie

Kercem