Europeanization and language: the impact of EU language status on Maltese

ABSTRACT

This article explores an area of Europeanization literature not studied before, namely the impact of EU language status on a state language. Using Maltese, the Union’s only Semitic language, as a case study, the article explores how that status, the resources allocated to EU languages as well as the EU’s language programmes have impacted the Maltese language, its domestic status, use, corpus and its relationship with Malta’s other official language, English. Using a series of semi-structured interviews with the members of the National Council for the Maltese Language, we explore how the EU has impacted Maltese, noting that membership has enabled Maltese to gain greater prominence both within the country and beyond its shores, to strengthen its corpus with a rapid increase in available terminology and facilitate the use of the language through EU translation tools. That said, any long-term impact of ‘Brussels’ Maltese’ is unclear and the EU’s language programmes have had a negligible influence. As in many areas of socialisation, a key element has been the empowering of domestic reform coalitions which, in the case of Maltese, have been a significant factor in the language’s increased prominence and use post-membership.

KEYWORDS:

• Europeanization
• EU language status
• Maltese language
• reform coalitions
• e-translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While significantly higher than the 83,000 Gaelic speakers estimated to reside in Ireland (Government of Ireland, 9), Gaelic is a second language for Ireland’s 5 million inhabitants.

2. Maltese, like many language communities, is not without its internal discords and one major difference of opinion centres on the way foreign words are brought into the language. One school of thought advocates taking English words and then morphologically integrating them with Maltese pronominal inflections. The other approach and which EU terminologists seemed to prefer (Portelli 2017) was to take words already found in Maltese and add Latin or Greek affixes where possible.