Any language is a living thing and changes with time.
The way Maltese is spoken today is different from how it used to be 100 years ago – perhaps even just 10 years ago.
This is because influences from other languages have a direct effect on the evolution of a given language. Words that were common in the past may no longer be in use today, having been replaced by others. Expressions in pure Maltese – the so-called idioms – are unfortunately disappearing from our daily speech, and the occasions when younger generations cannot understand the older ones become more common.
The debate as to whether pure Maltese still exists, in spite of the constant bombardment from other languages, continues and it is hard to draw the line between what is purely Maltese and what is not.
Over the years, with the various developments that have taken place, new words have made their way into the Maltese language for which there was no real Maltese word to use, and this has resulted in the adaptation of a foreign word that has become part and
parcel of our language.
Simple examples are television, computer, wire, fuel, chairman, roundabout, goal and coach – all foreign words to which we have given the English plural, rather than adopt one of the many plural forms we have in the Maltese language.
In more recent years, we have even started to spell these words as we pronounce them in Maltese – televixin, kompjuter, wajer, fjuwil, cermen, rawndebawt, gowl and kowc – and grammatically correct as they may be for an examination in Maltese, words written like this look really ugly.
Newspapers in Maltese have recently started to use such spellings and there have been times when new words written like this have had to be read over and over again for the reader to understand them.
Scholars say that this is the correct way to spell foreign words in Maltese but, we repeat, it just does not look right.
What is perhaps worse is spoken Maltese. Whereas journalists and writers have some time to write down their articles or stories, and these are corrected as much as possible before they go to print, spoken Maltese – once spoken – cannot be amended.
As such, Maltese spoken in the media – which has a heavy influence on the way a language evolves – leaves a lot to be desired, to put it mildly.
Again, news bulletins that are prepared beforehand and are simply read by the newscaster are very often written in excellent Maltese, although there have been many occasions when listeners have found it hard to follow and understand, and the tonality and accents have been wrong. Most teleserials on local television stations are often written in brilliant Maltese, too.
What is worrying is the impromptu Maltese spoken on the media, both on the radio and on television. For one thing, the use of foreign expressions, mostly in English and sometimes in Italian, is so common that in the end, one does not know whether the speaker is trying to fit in some Maltese with English or the other way round.
Secondly, there are occasions when sentence construction is so horrible that listeners end up not understanding what has just been said. Of course, the way we speak is quite different from the way we write, but at the end of the day the goal is the same – that people understand what you are saying. And many times this is not the case.
The problem is that many people in the spoken media do not have a solid base in the Maltese language, and yet they are on the radio or on television speaking in bad Maltese and influencing the rest of the country.
Television and radio stations should assess all those who will be presenting programmes for their spoken Maltese before putting them on air. You would never get a BBC presenter who speaks English badly.