It does not follow from this that Maltese is the mother tongue of all Maltese people, or that there are no Maltese people (like me) who have two mother tongues and not one.

It is not I who is biased. It is you: another one of those Maltese-language obsessives. Try to understand that 164 years as a British colony makes English part of Maltese society, particularly those people in Malta who used English beginning in the early 1800s.

Why exactly do you think people speak English in the United States and Australia? It’s not because the people were all English.

I am bilingual because I think in Maltese and English, depending on which language I’m speaking. You need language to think – and that’s exactly why people with a poor vocabulary, or who speak only Maltese, have great difficulty with certain concepts. It’s because they don’t have the words to form the thoughts.

How many of those conversations have you have over the dinner-table? I now turn away and start a conversation on the other side.

How can you love a language? That’s ridiculous. You can only love people and animals, not something non-responsive.

You just don’t get this do you: for many Maltese, English IS their mother tongue. Or they have two mother tongues (like me): English and Maltese.

We don’t identify more strongly with Maltese than we do with English. They’re both the same to us, and some identify more strongly with English.

I think you’re missing the essential point here that Malta was a British colony for almost 200 years. That’s a bloody long time – almost as long as the period it was settled by Siculo-Arabs who spoke the Arabic from which Maltese devolved.

The process with English was similar, except that fewer spoke it. But left to our own devices, and without the language police shitting all over English and forcing us to speak Maltese and say stuff like ‘blekbord’, thousands of Maltese people would be speaking English today just as thousands spoke Arabic (which became Maltese) back then.

In any case, people shouldn’t be encouraged to waste time on Maltese at the expense of English. It’s criminal.

It is, believe me. I speak the language. When Maltese people say ‘humble’, they’re thinking of ‘umli’. But the two words do not mean the same thing.

These are the adjectives you want, when you wrongly use ‘humble’: UNASSUMING and SELF-EFFACING.

Maltese people say ‘humble’ generally because their English vocabulary does not stretch that far. But that is no excuse. If you don’t know the right word, just learn it.

I can totally understand what you mean but describing somebody (maybe not a politician) as humble is, in my opinion, definitely not an insult.