A few weeks ago, I phoned a local restaurant to make a booking. I don’t exactly know how the exchange progressed, but what started out as a question in Maltese, quickly turned to me switching to English to literally no avail.

In pure desperation to get the job done and continue going about my day, I asked them if they spoke French, fully knowing that my at best remedial level wasn’t going to get me past anything except asking for directions to the nearest boulangerie. After what seemed like an age, a woman answered: “Russia.” Unprepared fool that I was, I knew that I was no match for this: the booking remained unmade.

While some might dismiss this as a frivolous occasion for communication not to take place, the same cannot be said for what happened to a well-known author a week or so ago when he phoned the hospital and couldn’t get information in either Maltese or English.

You would think that at least our most important institutions would have gotten accustomed to the human need to mutually intelligible communication, but sadly, that ship has sailed out to open seas and already been attacked by a giant squid called Henry.

If we pull our socks up collectively we might even be able to do the impossible

For a country where language is such a post-colonial hot potato, I’m always amazed at how poor linguistic levels are. Maltese speakers write comments in embarrassingly incorrect and incoherent Maltese telling people to speak or write in Maltese.

The levels of many supposed English speakers are equally laden with pidgin sentence constructions and Maltesisms that would make Samuel Johnson turn in his grave, and now we have a new breed of people amongst us that can’t speak either. It’s simply unheard of in any civilised country with an ounce of pride and what’s more, many employers just don’t seem to care.

It’s already impossible for me to comprehend how children who have been basically force fed the English language from the ages of five till 16 are barely able to ask for Diet Coke in a kiosk in the language, but now we seem to be going beyond this and are being expected to just mime what we want in the hopes that the other person will understand what is needed through elaborate song or dance.

I’m not saying that these people are unemployable, but it should be apparent to even the least careful ear that they aren’t suited to a front of house job, simply because it will be easier for everyone involved. Every single person in this country who is working with people should at least be able to communicate in one of our (two) official languages and we should do our best to make that happen.

Then again, at least those “foreigners” haven’t lived here their whole lives and received formal, obligatory education paid from all our taxes with the result of still not knowing how to write in either language properly. Who knows, if we pull our socks up collectively we might even be able to do the impossible and have a newspaper comments board that doesn’t look like a toddler thew up all over it.