Last week, social media networks were flooded with comments about the speech that Michelle Muscat gave on Women’s Day. Whilst I will not comment about the content of the speech because I didn’t listen to it, the Facebook comments about her accent and pronunciation reminded me of schoolyard bullying.

When I was nine years old I was moved from one of the best co-ed Maltese-speaking schools on the island to an all-girl, English-speaking school. The language change was not a problem because, even at that age, I could already speak English very well but, because I’m Maltese and (shock horror) we spoke Maltese at home, my pronunciation wasn’t perfect. It still isn’t – and never will be, for that matter. 

For months on end that new schoolyard was full of girls bitching about my accent. It was hell on earth. I was taunted, bullied and picked on for saying ‘Frence’, instead of ‘France’ and ‘tree’ instead of ‘three’. I was shunned for saying ‘modderr’ instead of ‘mother’ and ‘wuman’ instead of ‘wimmen’. It didn’t matter that I was top of my class and that I could outrun most of the lazy buggers in a sprint; for a few months, all that mattered was that I didn’t speak the way the others did.

The truth is that the way those silly girls spoke wasn’t the right way of speaking either. Their accent, intonation and pronunciation were just another concoction of Maltese and English (Minglish, I call it) – a concoction that was different to mine, but still nowhere near correct.

Unfortunately, because childhood experiences seem to follow us throughout our lives, today – 30 years later – I still cringe when I hear a Maltese person speaking English with a really thick Maltese pronunciation, especially if it’s a public speech. But, let’s face it, it’s my cringing that I should be ashamed of and not the speakers because it is ridiculous to cringe at what is essentially a natural way of speaking English when you are Maltese. It’s only our inbuilt inferiority complex that has us snubbing our own people in the belief that if they don’t ‘pass’ as native speakers they will not be taken seriously.

I’m not talking about bad grammar or bad spelling here because there’s no excuse for turning nouns into verbs or using the wrong tense. And I’m not talking about bad content and bad arguments either, but ‘bad’ pronunciation is a phenomenon that affects every non-native speaker of any language – it’s what makes everyone and anyone (except for trained actors) carry the intonation and phonological processes from their mother tongue into their second language. 

The saddest thing is that when Mrs Muscat gives a speech in English, we cringe, but when we listen to a French man garble the words   “…you say dat you ave neveer eard of ze grate Brudget Bardoe?” we melt, and call him cute. And have you ever listened to Jean-Claude Junker, Angela Merkel and Jose’ Barossa give a speech in English? As thick as their accent and pronunciation is, I bet you didn’t cringe did you?

Whilst the medium might very well be the message, it’s time that we grew up and stopped this schoolyard mentality – especially amongst us females, where it seems to fester the most. To judge people by anything else except by what they say and do is petty, futile and wrong. It’s time that we got it into our thick heads that anyone who has been born and bred here in Malta, or anywhere else for that matter, will always have some kind of an accent that’s different to a native speaker. In fact, except for maybe the Queen and possibly her immediate family, no one, not even the British, speak what we consider ‘proper’ English.  

So what if some of us pronounce a ‘d’ as ‘t’, or roll an ‘r’ a bit too much? What we should really be ashamed of are Maltese people who can’t speak Maltese to save their lives, and those who put on a fake English accent – even when cussing in Maltese – especially if they do so to make vulgar swear words sound a little bit posher.