Maltralian: The Maltese Ethnolect of Australia

by Roderick Bovingdon

published by Munich: Lincom Grammar Surveys

The migration of Maltese nationals to Australia objectified in this compact but thought-provoking volume addressing their ethnolect has a long history harking back to the early 19th century when the first known bona fide Maltese emigrant to this continent – a certain Antonio Azzopardi (1805–1881), a draughtsman from the village of Żejtun – showed up in Melbourne in 1838.

The first organised group of Maltese migrants to Australia materialised much later in 1883. The traditional core of these new arrivals, ordinarily young unmarried males, represented predominantly the social class of labourers employed in farming and the mining industry.

Their ethnicity intimately evoked by their exotic linguistic code and shared confessional identity can be said to have yielded a group cohesion and work ethic akin to that typified in Weber (1905).

In sociolinguistic terms, we are dealing with a breakaway group adapting their native competence in homeland Maltese to a new and unfamiliar sociocultural environment.

In the case of Maltese, speakers are known to project a strong sentimental attachment to this language across time and place.

As a matter of fact, the migratory narrative recounted by Bovingdon with Australia as target typifies in purely historical terms a relatively recent scenario.

The most favoured venues of Maltese emigrants in the preceding centuries were the Maghreb and Egypt. The passage from Malta, a British colony, to a Commonwealth country naturally ensured a certain degree of continuity, particularly interactive contact, in both venues, with the English language.

The book cover

The norms of spoken and written Maltese usage in Australia appears to be the cumulative outcome of a linguistic heritage of migration in the first six decades of the 20th century, especially after World War II.

The descendants of these migrations represent today the largest Maltese diaspora in the world totalling, according to Bovingdon, “some 170, 000 individuals, 40,000 of whom were actually born in Malta or its sister island Gozo…” The population of the Maltese islands is about 445, 000.

In the pioneering work under study, the author, a native speaker of homeland Maltese and Australian citizen undertakes a preliminary probe of this language as currently spoken across different parts of this vast continent and here proffers inter alia a representative glossary comprising about 1,000 open class lexemes with illustrative sentences and etymologies.

The author designates this Australian variety of Maltese with the neologism ‘Maltralian’ (on the model of Westralian < West Australian).

Bovingdon’s volume comprises seven chapters; his introduction expounds the objectives and some methodological aspects of his compact study whose aim is principally to portray the nature and extent of formal change in the structure of Maltese that has transpired in the process of transfer from its homeland to an Australian socio-cultural context.

Matching the continuous textual citations in this work with standard Maltese parallels one notes that the differences are mostly of a lexical nature affecting integrated loanwords from Italian and English and usually involve morpholexical usage.

It is a well-known fact that homeland Maltese evolved a derivational strategy for integrating Italian verb stems into its Semitic inflectional scheme of finally weak roots, e.g. It. offrire ‘to offer’ > Malt. offra ‘he offered’: offrejt ‘I offered’, offrejna ‘we offered’.

This derivational scheme in the homeland variety has been extended to accommodate English loans: Eng. to skid > Malt. skiddja ‘he skidded’; skiddjajt ‘I skidded’.

A valuable bibliographical source documenting recent research on Maltese linguistics, ethnicity, and migration

In the Australian scene, this lexification pattern has been freely extended and yields lexical combinations that a homeland speaker would not immediately comprehend since many new products of this process sometimes draw on Australian English lexemes unfamiliar to speakers acquainted with British Standard English: bbraxxja ‘to clear land of its undergrowth’ < AE brush; ddobbja ‘he offered’ < AE dob (pp. 39-46).

Given their bilingual environment, the propensity of Maltralian speakers to resort to code-switching is naturally more pronounced than it is in a homeland monolingual context. Thus, a salient discrepancy between these two varieties of Maltese is the differential lexical impact of English.

In chapter 6, Bovingdon outlines a set of morphological traits special to Maltralian; these also relate to morpholexical factors such as pluralisation devices, both Semitic and Romance, and the formation of comparative adjectives.

His foray into Australian Maltese does not merely provide a revealing first glance into the speech patterns of this ethnolect, but also devotes two innovative chapters (2–3) reviewing the historical background and statistics of the Maltese diaspora in Australia as well as the emergence of artistic literary expression in Maltralian.

Above all, a salient iconic transformation that Maltese lives through in its transfer to the Australian content is that it becomes an ethnolect evoking what Novak (1971: 56) designates by the term ‘ethnic memory’ engendered in a distant cultural and historical landscape.

This perspective on ethnolects surviving in a bilingual cultural context provides a crucial insight into their psychological importance for their speakers and the consequent need for their maintenance in the diaspora.

Migrants from Malta and Gozo working in sugar-cane farms in Mackay Queensland.

Given the essentially bilingual speech habits of Maltralian speakers, their intensive contact with English has naturally licensed a virtually unlimited lexical stratum drawing on this language. The analytically suggestive lexical material proffered in Bovingdon’s study would seem to justify a more extensive research project delving specifically into the loanword morphology of Maltralian.

Ultimately, the Maltese sociocultural and linguistic scenario enacted in an Australian context represents one strand of linguistic history notably paralleled by numerous others within a multilingual context.

Bovingdon, who as a native speaker of Maltese is intimately familiar with the actualities of his native idiom in the homeland, is to be highly commended for his initiative in shouldering the demanding task of conducting a field study of the speech patterns of the Maltese-speaking community across the Australian continent.

The linguistic material presented in this study was painstakingly gleaned partly from recorded interviews with speakers of Maltese from mutually distant communities in Sydney and Wollongong (New South Wales), Melbourne (Victoria), Mackay and Brisbane (Queensland), Adelaide (South Australia), Perth (Western Australia), and more. This exploratory documentation has been amplified via consultation of different types of literary sources such as locally published Maltese language newspapers.

Bovingdon’s pioneering compact study of the Australian variety of Maltese is a highly original and linguistically stimulating contribution inviting further comparative probes into diaspora varieties of the language. The reader of this fascinating study will also find it a valuable bibliographical source documenting recent research on Maltese linguistics, ethnicity, and migration.

Alexander Borg is Professor Emeritus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.