There must be something ambivalent or, worse, deeply wrong in the way we as a country perceive our national language.

It has often been said that any time the Maltese fight for their language, it is the English language that seems to benefit. This was certainly the case in the 1930s when the predominance of the Italian language was finally broken. Nonetheless, it seems this is a recurrent problem. Independence, a republic, an EU member State, and still the problem persists. We may have attained sovereignty, an exalted respect all over the world, but we ourselves have not yet found a proper way to respect our national language. We could say, as is sometimes said, that our language is our national DNA, but that’s a very expressive way to say things, and nothing else.

Look at the mess we made and still are making of our language and its newly acquired rights in EU institutions. First we did not have enough interpreters and translators, even though we marked it as a signal incentive, the fact that our language was an officially recognised EU language when Catalan, Welsh, Gaelic, Basque etc., which are spoken far far more than Maltese, are not.

And now that, at long last and with a lot of help from the EU itself, these posts have started being filled, we still have MEPs who for some reason or another still choose to speak in another language when all around them, other MEPs proudly speak their language. When you dig around, you find that the reason is no overt disrespect for the national language but a basic conviction that Maltese as a language is simply inadequate to express technical financial concepts or similarly sophisticated concepts.

This, when one thinks about it, is more or less equivalent to the popular and mistaken reactions here when the first, admittedly gross, efforts at translation of EU documents were published: the conviction that Maltese may be fine for speaking to each other but totally inadequate to express the sophisticated concepts of today’s world.

This shows that we still have a long way to go.

On the one hand, we have inimitable examples, such as the Saydon translation of the Bible, simple, distinguished and grandiose, and really, really Maltese; some (not all) of the books being published, and some really good efforts like the well-reasoned and well-presented case put by the National Council for the Maltese Language for choosing the Maltese translation of euro (see article on page 8).

But, on the other hand, there are innumerable instances where Maltese is downgraded so far in our minds that it becomes a language unworthy of respect, since it is not respected by the Maltese themselves.

For instance, we see and hear innumerable instances on a daily basis where Maltese is written wrongly, wrong grammar, syntax, expression, where it is obvious that a concept couched in a foreign language is simply transposed into Maltese without being Maltese.

Israel, for example, which had many of these problems (and worse) has (had) a programme called A Hebrew Moment on the radio that addresses common language errors. A speaker makes a grammatical error and another speaker corrects him: “It is more elegant to say…” None of this happens in Malta and everyone remains with the same level of ignorance as before. Nothing is done to improve the level of Maltese spoken in television news, which is followed by the whole population, and nothing is done about the innumerable mistakes made in Maltese language newspapers.

Nor is anything done to the latest fad, which, as usual, we have borrowed from Italy, warts and all: this habit of television programmes carrying SMS messages written in very bad Maltese (and English) and allowed to run, thus further corrupting the average person’s knowledge of Maltese.

This is, so to speak, the lower range of the issue. At the higher range, for a long time now, we have just been adding to the amount of foreign words in our language without trying to take an organic approach to find a suitable Maltese word rather than a foreign word written in Maltese, or even made to function like any Maltese word with suffixes and prefixes.

We must understand that unless concerted action is taken, our language will go the way of so many other, even more glorious, languages that are now dead letters. Brussels’ recognition of Maltese as an official language will not save it. It is only if we ourselves value Maltese as something uniquely our own and as a real, not artificial, language, that it can be saved for future generations.

Preserving the national language is as important, if not more, as saving the environment.

Later generations may come to curse this generation for allowing so much construction to go on. They may blame us, not without reason, for the uglification of Malta. But they will certainly despise us for not taking adequate steps to protect the national language from the ravages of time.