Like many people, I once did a brief stint teaching English as a Foreign Language at a language school.

One thing I immediately noticed was that German and Swedish students, who had studied English at school for about seven years, seemed to have a better grasp of grammar, syntax and idiom than Maltese students who have been exposed to English all their lives. This was puzzling to me and it still is.

Despite English being our official second language, the only obvious conclusion is that there is something clearly wrong with the way it is being taught in our schools. Of course, I stand to be corrected, and maybe the problem lies elsewhere. But what is indisputable is that not only are we not producing a nation of people who are proudly bi-lingual, but we are also mangling English to death. So maybe it’s time it was taught as a foreign language, using the formula of language schools.

Now, people often wring their hands that the standard of Maltese, too, is suffering but lately I’ve started to have my doubts about this. You see, what is happening is that people are taking non-Maltese words, bashing them around the head and squeezing them mercilessly until they fit into the Maltese mould – they change the way they are spelt, they force them into Maltese grammatical rules and hey presto, a verb like “to sunbathe” become “tissanbedja”.

Look, Ma, I made a new word.

Here, I disagree with purists that Maltese is thus heading towards an inevitable death – on the contrary, from what I hear around me, Maltese is so alive and vibrant that it has physically overpowered one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. If we don’t have a word for something in Maltese, never fear, we’ll take the English word and pummel it repeatedly until by sheer force of will it becomes a Maltese word. Today’s spoken Maltese is a hybrid mixture of our original Semitic language, a few borrowed Italian words and English phrases which are kept in their original form (“Il-vera looking forward bhalissa”) and then those poor misshapen words which have been forced to become Maltese against their will (futbol, plejer, studjow).

It’s enough to make you weep.

Mind your language

The real victim in all this is English.

You don’t need me to tell you that English has taken a sharp nosedive over the last 20 years. The evidence of it being butchered, massacred and generally badly spoken can be heard all around us. Those who post comments on blogs and discussion forums have amply demonstrated that there is a serious problem with our spelling – and this in the age of computers with inbuilt spell checks. But a spell check won’t tell you when you are confusing one word with another – for that you have to resort to that old-fashioned device called a dictionary.

So here is a little lesson for all those people who continue to write in to taunt Labour party supporters – the correct word is “you are losers”, and not “loosers” (which doesn’t exist). You should write ‘you always lose’ and not ‘you always loose’, because loose means when something is not tight. Please people, if you insist on persisting in this barrage of insults, the least you can do is to get your meanings straight.

I have several teeth-grinding examples of what amounts to Pidgin English. Here is just a sample.

“Did you hurt?” (I have to bite my tongue when I hear this one because I feel like saying “I will hurt you if you don’t say it properly”).

Now, what this person really means is “did you hurt yourself”. The fact is that too many people speak English by translating literally from the equivalent Maltese phrase rather than because they speak English idiomatically – and no, these people are not only Labour voters (I’m sorry, but I just have to burst that particular bubble). I find this habit inexplicable when we are surrounded by English language TV programmes and films, in which we hear the language spoken correctly. When I try to wrack my brains as to why so many people cannot grasp basic English syntax and grammar, I inevitably come back to our schools, and by extension teachers who may be brilliant at the subject they teach (say, Maths) but whose English is faulty. Of course, well-meaning parents who attempt to speak their version of English to their children are also to blame.

How else to explain generations of people going around asking “you have the time?” without using the word “do” at the beginning of the sentence?

This is a subject I’ve written about before, because I’ve always been mesmerised by the fact that many Maltese people think that the way to ask a question in English is by raising the intonation of your voice at the end of the sentence rather than by using “do”. It is clear what is happening when one bears in mind that the Maltese phrase is “ghandek hin?” We are merely substituting words literally from one language to the other.

The result is a general downward spiral of a nation that does not bother with speaking English correctly any more.

Here is another of my pet hates: the wrong pronunciation of “bowl”. I could write a thesis on this one. Who, please tell me, who was the person who instilled in people’s brains that this word is pronounced to rhyme with “owl”? Every time I hear a recipe on TV with the chef saying he’s going to put the mixture in the “b-owl”, I end up chanting at my TV set: “it’s bowl, bowl, bowl” to rhyme with “pole”.

And (deep breath here) in which universe was it decided that it is “Thanks God!”... rather than Thank God…? A friend of mine has a particular aversion to the wrongly used phrase so when I recently saw it used for the name of a house, I just had to message her. What can you do? Better to have a sense of humour about it.

As for that blessed “th” - don’t even get me started. I was breaking out into a cold sweat every time I heard Morena sing “dey breed down my neck”.

(As an aside, my sympathies to the Gozitan lass for not making it through to the finals. I guess it’s back to the drawing board for the MaltaSong committee. Or, here’s a thought – resign?)

But back to English. We also seem to have developed a problem distinguishing between verbs and nouns. Do you notice how people speak about installing “air-condition”, when it is “air-conditioning”. And too often I hear people say “I have a complain” when what they really have is a “complaint”. Maybe this is because we like to cut things short, like when we chop off people’s names to an abbreviated style. Or maybe it’s just linguistic laziness. U iva, mhux xorta, people say with a shrug. You understood me didn’t you?

But our malapropisms can make native English language speakers do a double take. “What do you pretend?” is used when what the person really means is “what do you expect?” (well, sometimes I like to pretend that I’m billionaire who doesn’t have to work for a living...) Of course, this one can be attributed to the meaning of the word in the Italian language: “pretendere” which evolved into the Maltese “tippretendi”.

So, OK, with all these languages swirling in our head, maybe we can be forgiven for getting muddled up sometimes. But, it would be nice if someone took this whole matter of spoken English in hand and try to steer it back onto its former well-chartered course. Because this is what gets me – once upon a time, those who spoke English spoke it perfectly, while now, it is getting harder and harder to hear the language being “spoken” without wincing.

Or crying.

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