Patrick Formosa's pride and joy! The meticulosity with which the author has treated his pet subject, his birthplace no less, deserves one's utmost admiration. For the author's passionate descriptions of otherwise little known details about the inhabitants of the village of Għarb and their triumphs and woes, their achievements over the centuries, in this quiet rustic corner to the north-west of Malta's sister isle, provides a breathtaking delight to all readers who appreciate the cultural richness silently preserved through time immemorial.

For within this recent publication entitled A History of Għarb by Patrick Formosa, Melitensia buffs will find a treasure trove of well-documented information from all aspects of the Għarb natives human endeavours through the ages.

In the author's zest to present before his readership only the best of his native village, he engaged the services of the reputed photographer Daniel Cilia, whose artistic bent in his approach to photography is legendary. No wonder so many of his works have embellished Malta's top quality publications; no matter the subject no less!

Notwithstanding these high qualities in this marvellous pictorial and factually descriptive account of one of the Maltese Islands' smaller and little known villages, my attention upon acquiring a copy of this work, was immediately directed towards the legendary linguistic legacy this fascinating rural outpost has preserved through the eons of time.

Reminiscent of yesteryear, yet still tenaciously clinging to its distant past, the peculiar dialect one can still relish emanating mellifluously from the depths of Għarb's native residents' souls, immediately grasps the academic as much as the inquisitive listeners' attention. For in the village of Għarb one may not only hear the long forgotten pronunciations of the long lost radicals għajn and rgħajn, a distant rarity even throughout the Arabic-speaking world, but the attentive ear, sensitive to linguistic subtleties, is additionally rewarded with other peculiar language qualities unheard of anywhere else in the Maltese Islands, except for the odd elderly individual one might luckily encounter on the rarest of occasions from the idiolect of some old time settler somewhere on the Australian island continent.

Indeed those who are unfamiliar with the Arabic-speaking world, encompassing so many different countries with their varying speech forms, the pronunciation of the two speech radicals given above, is today also a rarity to be heard. I venture to say, in fact, that I have heard closer proximants to these radicals in today's Modern Hebrew in Israel rather than anywhere else!

But Għarb's linguistic relic should NOT remain confined to our wonderment alone until it eventually becomes a forgotten remnant of the past, but some students or preferably seasoned academics ought to, without any further delay, proceed to the picturesque village of Għarb and undertake a thorough, all-round investigation of what's left of this moribund yet beautiful dialect.

For this wonderful still extant linguistic heritage can only continue its rapidly encroaching demise with the onset of today's digital frenzy and its unfortunate destructive indiscriminate inroads upon our human speech forms.

Along with the richness of Għarb's unique speech qualities, in addition to the preservations of long lost consonantal sounds in our ancient rich and beautiful tongue, Maltese, the Għarb dialect includes vocables peculiar only to Għarb, voice intonations which alter one's semantics accordingly, as well as idioms, phrases, traditional sayings jealously guarded by the speakers whose social timid and reserved behaviour reveals ancient lore of distant ages.

For this unique service to the Maltese language and indeed to the entire Maltese nation, Patrick Formosa, the diligent author of this revealing anthropological, social, linguistic, folkloristic, historical treatise, deserves the due admiration of the entire Maltese nation. Our celebrated author deserves this public accolade for a service to his people and to posterity.