I agree with everything that Labour shadow minister Evarist Bartolo says on the subject of how English and Maltese are taught in schools, and why neither language is learned properly. So I thought it unfortunate that he began his article on the subject, in MaltaToday last Sunday, with a spectacular piece of literal translation from Maltese to (unidiomatic) English: “We have thousands of children being brought up in families where English is not spoken regularly. We have thousands of children living on these islands whose first language is not Maltese.”

We have thousands of children? We have thousands of children living on these islands? Really? You don’t say. English uses ‘there are’, and better still, avoids this altogether and lets the verb speak for itself, as in: “Thousands of Maltese children are brought up in homes/households” – preferable to ‘families’, which reveals a southern European mental construct that is alien to English – “where English is not spoken regularly, while thousands more do not speak Maltese as a first language.”

But why am I carping? Bartolo has unwittingly illustrated his own point that languages are a bloody business, and so children need all the help they can get. Did I say children? Adults need it too. The English written and spoken by Maltese grown-ups has long since parted company with anything that a native English speaker might recognise or understand. Most conspicuous is the loss of the interrogative form. When did you last hear a Maltese person form a question properly in English? “You’re going?” “You’re staying?” “You bought that one?” They think they’re speaking English and then wonder why the only people who seem to understand them are other Maltese people.

Then there’s the limited vocabulary. Even those who think themselves sophisticated butterflies in our tedious social whirl have ever fewer words at their disposal, so that conversations sound astonishingly like an adult version of those Janet-and-John books we read in Miss Tanti’s class in primary school. ‘John has a new car.’ ‘I saw John’s new car.’ ‘It’s really nice.’ ‘I like it.’ ‘I prefer the blue one.’ ‘No, black is nice.’ ‘I like black.’

If somebody at the university were to conduct research into the number of nouns, adjectives and verbs used by supposedly educated Maltese people when speaking English (perhaps this research has been undertaken already; if so, please point me in the right direction) they might find that it is roughly at par with the number used by the British underclass. Even the supposedly sophisticated are unable or unwilling to take advantage of English’s vast lexicon without sounding like a third-world conference delegate reading a speech written by somebody who speaks English as a fourth language. Politicians on both sides of the House are the very worst culprits.

I can’t help thinking that this is because the Maltese mind can’t see the point of so many words and dispenses with what it thinks to be the surplus, making do with a serviceable core of basic words, retaining the functional and dispensing with the decorative and expressive. The indigenous language is functional, and so we crop English to fit with what we know. And back we come to the tiresome question of whether impoverished thought breeds impoverished language or vice versa.

As Evarist Bartolo remarked (something I have written about, too, and several times), the source of our linguistic ills is a national curriculum which insists on a one-size-fits-all policy. It assumes, quite ridiculously, that all children speak both Maltese and English as mother tongues. If such children do exist, then they are in a minority so tiny as to be completely insignificant – less than a hundred of them, perhaps, if that. Yet the national curriculum in English and Maltese is tailor-made for them, while everyone else goes to hell – or rather, through hell.

Bartolo pointed out what is blatantly obvious: that thousands of children have to be taught English as a foreign language because they know little or nothing of it, while thousands of others must be taught Maltese as a foreign language because they do not use it at home. But our inverted snobbery and parochial obsession with ‘national identity’ does not allow us to acknowledge the latter situation, while our deluded belief that we are a bilingual people (nothing could be further from the truth) prevents us from seeing the hard truth of the former.

I would add that in between the extremes there are shades of grey which call for lessons of a different order still: children who know only Manglish and believe it to be English; children who speak fluent Maltese but whose general education is so poor that they are unable to understand how sentences are formed or why grammar is what it is. Has nobody stopped to wonder why it is the very people who speak nothing but Maltese who spell and write it worst of all?

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