Maltese children's rhymes and poetry

Abstract

The songs and ditties falling under the heading 'Children's Rhymes' immediately conjure up recollections of our earliest existence and childhood activities, of games and emotions long since forgotten. There is a considerable Maltese material which can be grouped under the heading Children's Rhymes, whether of the nursery type or not. However, owing to social pressures and to a mistaken sense of prestige values equating higher status with 'Englishness' in speech and manners, many Maltese parents generally tend to discard the words and jingles in which they were themselves brought up in favour of English rhymes that are in reality alien to the Maltese tradition. Matters are not made any better in the schools, where Maltese rhymes do not figure in the organized play activities of the pupils. As verses learnt in early childhood are not usually passed on again until the little listeners have grown up, and have children of their own, what may well happen is a complete break in the process of transmission which, in some thirty years time, might result in the disappearance of a good part of our traditional nursery lore, and consequently in the loss or distortion of our national identity. The article also contains a list of children's rhymes in Maltese, then translated in English.