It was very heartening to see the results of a survey carried out by the National Council for the Maltese Language and the Department of Maltese within the University of Malta in collaboration with the National Statistics Office last week.

The survey found that 97% of adults with Maltese citizenship consider Maltese as their first language and that while formal communication is mostly done in English, Maltese remains far and away the most prevalent language for use in communicating with family and friends.

Malta has something which is not necessarily found elsewhere: the country is bilingual.

Malta’s linguistical history has developed very much pari-passu (those with a knowledge of the Language Question will understand the pun there) with the country’s colonial history – and our bilingualism is born out of the extended stay of our most recent colonial masters: the British.

It’s something which has its very obvious positives: English is a near-enough universal language globally, and having it incorporated into our education and culture is important in a world which is becoming more and more globalised.

The potential downside of bilingualism, however, is the risk that one language ends up overbearing on the other.  With English being such a universal language and the world, as we said, becoming more globalised, the fear of many is that the mother tongue will end up being marginalised by the secondary (albeit official anyway) language.

The results from this survey however seem to suggest that this fear has, happily, remained unfounded.

One interesting statistics which did emerge from the survey was the while the majority feel that Maltese is easier to verbalise and speak than English; the majority then felt that English is easier to read and write than Maltese.

From a linguistic perspective, that is likely very true: writing Maltese properly is no easy feat.

This is something which we see on social media a lot in fact – while many choose to write and communicate in Maltese, the Maltese is generally not exactly – from a grammatical perspective – up to scratch.

Maltese is such that one can read a word as its spelt (irrelevant of how terribly it’s written) and still understand it, however making the effort to spell things correctly ultimately helps the language as a whole.

It’s not all bad on social media though: there are some very prominent social media pages such as the wonderful ‘Kelma Kelma’ and ‘il-miklem’ to mention just two which do some incredible work to keep showing the beauty of the Maltese language, with the former known for providing and defining well known terms and phrases, and the latter known for delving into more obscure terms which may have been lost in years past.

Language is so important that colonists through history have sought to destroy native tongues – take the English in places like Scotland and Ireland – in order to quell a sense of national pride.

To see Maltese not only surviving, but continuing to thrive, is therefore a truly positive thing to see.