I agree David.

At home – not if your parents can hardly even speak Maltese.

Bilingualism needs to be practised at home as well, ideally with one parent speaking one language and the other another language in a child’s early years. Moreover, Maltese television is hardly the best thing for children to watch growing up. Most parents nowadays simply ignore all this and expect their children to learn English at school.

Then during the mintoffian regime there was a head on attack on the English language, the result of which, can still be felt today.

To-day all classrooms in every school are equipped with the latest digital equipment and the opportunity to make learning vivid and interesting is available. But what is actually happening in the classrooms? It is here – after the home- that education should be flourishing. But is it really?

Looking inwards all the time.

They feel so secure within the small confines of our tiny island and their minuscule brains.

Tuks fors please

So that is why many hotels, restaurants and other business are employing foreigners who cannot make the difference between ‘yes and no’ in English.

I think the observation the the level of English is deteriorating is rather superficial and does not do justice the complexity of the socio-linguistic situation.

It is almost certainly correct to state that the *average* level of English usage has dropped several notches because of the fact that far more many people use English nowadays than used to be the case in the past – or at least we all are exposed to levels of English usage among considerable swathes of the population which we were not familiar with three or four decades ago.

The democratisation of education – inherently obviously a positive development – has meant that a much larger proportion of the population know makes use of English. Different levels of linguistic ability mean that the average degree of mastery inevitably drops.

The social media have made sure that practically every person can parade his or her (lack of) knowledge to all and sundry.

You seem to have misread what I wrote, Jozef. Nowhere have I denigrated the Italian language nor have I used the term ‘fascist’. However, it is a fact that Italian is no longer a mother-tongue locally as it was when my grandparents used it habitually at home. Incidentally, I speak fluent Italian, but I still consider it a foreign language. English is not a foreign language to me and to many others.

The risk here is that what happened to the Italian language in the interwar period will also happen to the English language. The damage to our identity, apart from our economy and standard of education, may be irreparable.

It is the “other Malta”, including David, that is transcending the minority of truly bilingual people not the other way around, by perpetuating the denigration of Maltese anglophones as unpatriotic and morally inferior.