The Ministry of Education has allocated €80,000 to cover part of the research that is being carried out on the Maltese dictionary as part of a permanent research programme.
Prof. Ġuzé Aquilina had worked on two volumes of the Maltese dictionary (Maltese-English and English-Maltese) between 1987 and 1999, and had received assistance from the University of Malta and a number of academics, as well as from Midsea Books Ltd, the publishers of the work, among others.
The Maltese language has continued evolving at a fast rate and the number of studies and available documentation has increased significantly. Information technology has opened new horizons to lexicography that Prof. Aquilina couldn’t even dream of in his time.
Today, dictionaries have become the basis of a number of electronic linguistic tools such as the spell checker, electronic databases and algorithm systems that quickly convert speech into text and vice versa, and every European language has at least one online dictionary. New, convenient and necessary tools are constantly being developed.
The national council for the Maltese language (Il-Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Ilsien Malti) felt the need to update the studies on the Maltese language and encouraged the university and Midsea Books to set up a permanent research programme for the Maltese dictionary. The aim of the programme is to serve as a means of updating and expanding the online version of the dictionary, as well as bringing together the variety of lexical research being undertaken at the university under one umbrella.
The team of researchers is made up of four academics that have been updating the dictionary in line with the last two orthography reforms, revising some shortcomings, and adding words and meanings that hadn’t been included. The aim is for Maltese to have an online dictionary within a few years.
This would demonstrate the wealth of the Maltese language, and also give direction to students, teachers, journalists, translators and anyone who uses Maltese in their work or in their writing.