Purism and purist are beautiful words with positive connotations: transparency, clarity, cleanliness and, in a world beleaguered by pollution of the air and the waters and by corruption in business and politics, the idea of purity is also nostalgic.

Sadly, it still crops up when individuals speak about their own language and patriots and politicians love to associate their language with national identity. But language is much more than that. It is, first of all, a tool and, like all tools, it is appraised by its efficiency.

Many people extol the beauty of their language and refer to famous poets but, ironically, sales of poetry books are the lowest among all publications and they are rarely read outside school.

Maltese survived not because Caxaro wrote the Cantilena in the 1470s and Buonamico his quatrains in 1675 but because it was considered useful by the population. It survived thanks to its suppleness when spoken: the Maghrebi dialect that was brought to the islands by the Arabic-speaking community that settled here in 1048 absorbed words from Sicilian, Italian and English to keep pace with social and material progress since then. Otherwise, it would have died out as in Andalusia and Sicily.

This is proven by the word count in Joseph Aquilina’s Maltese-English Dictionary (1987-1990) whose 41,016 words comprise 13,293 words of Arabic origin, 21,519 words from Sicilian and Italian and 2,511 words from English. About 3,500 words are of unknown origin or hybrid formations (like fenkata and sakranazz).

In its Concise version (2006), the Arabic element goes down to 22.4 per cent, Romance rises to 61.6 per cent and English to 8.4 per cent, reflecting the actual state of the language. And, yet, Arabic words are more frequent in use because they comprise grammatical terms (article, pronouns, prepositions) and fundamental vocabulary. Consequently, our language is described as of Arabic origin but “it has distanced itself far too profoundly from the norms of spoken Arabic to be regarded as anything other than a separate language” (Alexander Borg).

The increase in population from 1526 (16,000 inhabitants) to 1797 (100,006) to 1934 (242,000) accounts for strong linguistic contact with foreign settlers through work and intermarriage on both the higher and lower strata. Its doubling to over 500,000 today explains the dominance of English, together with bilingual schooling and the international media, in everyday speech (thanks to foreign workers everywhere) and code-switching among ourselves.

Literature and everyday use

Purism is essentially a literary phenomenon. In normal conversation, speakers do not bother about the origin of the words they use. They pronounce the first words that come to mind, Sicilian, Italian or English, when they know that the listener understands it.

On the other hand, writers have time to reflect and make choices, often deleting and replacing words for aesthetic and expressive reasons, especially poets.

In Malta, purism began with Caxaro, who only used one Sicilian word, vintura, but the Cantilena is not proof that Maltese was still “pure” in those times. Vassalli could write poems without a single Romance word but his Lexicon contains a good number of Romance terms, as does the Damma of De Soldanis, with 2,000 out of 12,000 in 1750.

Incidentally, A.E. Caruana’s puristic dictionary brought Vassalli’s 18,000 entries down to 9,947 in 1903.

Dun Karm’s poems, Erin Serracino-Inglott’s Ir-Raħeb and Aquilina’s Taħt Tliet Saltniet were puristic because they spoke about very basic notions but their private correspondence and their dictionaries were not.

Among scholars, purism was a trend favoured by the pre-Romantics, especially Condillac and Herder, who sought to reconstruct languages to their older, presumably pure, state because they saw a continuous decline.

It reached its acme in the family tree of Indo-European languages devised by August Schleicher in 1860, modelled on Linnaeus and Darwin, in the belief that language is a living organism, born within the speaker. This did not allow contact and, unfortunately, the term “loanword” is a remnant of that theory.

Besides, dialects were thought to be corrupt forms of “the” language, and did not deserve to be written or studied but fieldwork soon revealed that the great European languages were originally dialects which became standardised in a long process comprising codification (grammars and dictionaries), institutional use (administration, law, religion), teaching in schools and prestige through literature.

Purism is essentially a literary phenomenon. In normal conversation, speakers do not bother about the origin of the words they use- Joseph M. Brincat

The crowning step was official recognition by the state. Maltese went through these stages from about 1700 to 1934.

Political implications

Purism also had political implications. In the Italian Risorgimento, it was a reaction against the cultural and military dominance of France, preparing the way for unification. In Malta, it was favoured by the British authorities who felt uncomfortable governing an island whose official language was Italian.

In 1838, G.P. Badger, adhering to the naturalistic theory of language, suggested that Arabic, not Italian, should be taught in the schools alongside English because Maltese was too corrupt.

In the 1870s, Keenan proposed that “the Maltese language ... should be purified by being brought nearer to the vocabulary and grammar of its parent language, Arabic”.

Lord Strickland revived the myth of the Punic origins of Maltese because he read L.A. Waddle’s The Phoenician origins of the Britons, Scots and Anglo-Saxons and concluded that “the majority of the Maltese are of Phoenician origin and more akin to the British than to the Latins by race”. This impressionistic theory had been introduced when Punic script had not even been deciphered but genetic studies have settled this issue now (Capelli, Felice et al 2005).

In Malta, it would be anachronistic to base the choice of vocabulary on etymology. Given that every writer has a right to his personal style, the best use of Maltese should be guided by attention to the precise meanings of words.

Our language is unique because it blends elements from three families: Semitic, Romance and Germanic. Thus, Sicilian, Italian and English words are as much part of our heritage as Laparelli’s walls, Caravaggio, Mattia Preti and Favray’s paintings, Baroque churches and Art Nouveau architecture.

But they must be used pragmatically, respecting their place in the lexical structure because perfect synonyms are rare.

Many speak of the roots but one must not lose sight of the tree, which has a trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers and fruit.

Professor Brincat published Maltese and other languages. A linguistic history of Malta (Midsea Books 2011, 2021) and co-edited Purism in minor languages with T. Stolz and W. Boeder (Brockmeyer 2003), where the matter is treated more fully.