Last Friday’s edition of Xarabank was not one of their best. Maybe the ‘experts’ invited were not the best one could find. And meanwhile, why this sudden preponderance of Labour-leaning ‘experts’?

The subject was the state of the Maltese language but then the discussion centred on whether Maltese or English should be used in schools, and Malta’s status as one of the few countries with two official languages, Maltese and English.

Let’s start here. Yes, it is unfortunate that Malta, along with five national days, has two official languages. That is the result of historical circumstances and also an imposition by the British colonial powers. Whatever the circumstances behind this imposition, it was also unnecessary. Let us explain.

The study of the historical development of the Maltese language is one of our best-kept secrets, one that most Maltese do not know about, a subject that should be, on the contrary, an obligatory subject in all our schools. For this is the very identity of us Maltese, our language is our national DNA. Without understanding it and how it came into being, we are doomed to throw away, as we are doing, what is one of our most important treasures. We are doomed to misunderstand what makes us Maltese, so different from other peoples, so unique, so rare among surrounding peoples.

When people visit us, and hear us speak, they form quite strange ideas about our language. Today, when they travel around, and see the names they have given to bus stops (except the surnames, though even those can be riveting) and when they in jest try to repeat them as one does with strange foreign languages, maybe they dimly start to unravel the skein that went into forming Maltese – the basic Arabic dialect (how many know we got that from Sicilian Arabic, not from North Africa?), then our Sicilian and later Italian superstructures, finally our English superstructures.

For this is what Maltese essentially is: A living language that over time absorbed and integrated the languages of the dominator, but through usage turned it into something other than its original. English is also like that, and probably most other languages.

In other words, there was never any reason to impose two official languages on Malta: Maltese, even by the 1930s, had sufficiently evolved to integrate the dominant language and it had already started to do that, as witnessed, if by no further evidence, by Juann Mamo’s Ulied in-Nanna Venut...

English became the official language, we might say, as a direct result of the language question between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Italian had become prevalent over the past centuries under the Knights, the French and even the British, the language used by the educated classes, the language of the court, the Church, etc. It was also used as a means to circumscribe the invasiveness of the English language of the colonial power. Even Italian, by our reasoning today, was surplus to requirements. And the sponsoring of anything Italian by the Fascist government, and later, Italy’s involvement in World War II, put paid to this trend in the Maltese language.

Shorn of its Italian sponsor and friend from so many centuries, the weak and young Maltese language has been overshadowed by English. Today, a sizeable and apparently ever increasing segment of Maltese speak English (badly) on a daily basis. English is the language of this and other papers. Teaching in English is widespread both because the complexity of some subjects and the easy availability of textbooks whereas everything would be far more difficult if everything had to be translated into Maltese.

Maltese is becoming impoverished, as a result: Not so long ago, loan words from other languages were integrated into the Maltese language. But today, many words in English are used in Maltese speech undigested and unassimilated.

At the same time also, there are not that many Maltese who really seem to be sensitive to the fragility and precariousness of the Maltese language and who are determined to do anything about it. Maybe some recent decisions by those who decide on how we write Maltese may have turned people away or at least into sceptics.