The bicultural situation in Malta

Abstract

ONCE part of the land-mass that constituted the future frontiers of what today are Europe and Africa, Malta is a storehouse of archaeological and other accumulated influences fusing different cultures. The European bison lies buried under this very soil, in the company of the African elephant and the ancestors of the elegant North African gazelle. Strange bedfellows, ensconced in our limestone: more than a fanciful metaphor this, of divergences converging upon the surface of these Islands and inside the milieu of Maltese life, gladly welcoming from outside its shores friendly guests with their various cultures. For us therefore the question, or problem, of biculturalism is anything but a new one. We have had to compromise throughout our history - and I use 'compromise' in the best possible existential sens, that is, in the matter of sheer survival - between what our rulers from the East, the South, the North or the West (one mustn't forget the Angevins, the Castillians and the Normans) wanted of us, and what was already our very own and which would distinguish us as a nation in its own right. Maltese, an offshoot of Arabic, continued to be spoken in the homes and Latin in the churches, the Courts and in most other public institutions.