Race and language in Malta

Abstract

It gives me great pleasure to be the first Gozitan to give an address in this Institute before a Gozitan audience. It gives me great pleasure because this is for me a welcome opportunity to show my appreciation of the work of the British Council. This Institute has been opened in a long neglected Island still burdened with the hardships of illiteracy and in many ways socially backward. We who are looking ahead to better times after this bitter war, which will have been fought in vain if we shall not have learned the necessity of social justice and equality of opportunity to all, cannot but be grateful to the British Council for their generous effort to make British culture accessible to our people. As a Maltese, loyal to my Faith, my Country and my King it gives me great pleasure to give this address here also because I feel that the aim and the purpose of this Institute are reassuringly genuine. It is not going to he cheap propaganda for the gullible, the exaltation of a super-race, nor the denationalisation or falsification of Maltese history but the growth of an Anglo-Maltese culture based on the mutual understanding of the British and Maltese communities. This is the aim of this Institute as it has been explained to us by the late Lord Lloyd and Sir Angus Gillan and I feel that it is in this spirit that Dr. Armstrong has invited me to talk to you on a subject of local interest. With subjects of local interest I have already dealt in my two addresses in the British Institute of Valletta. For you I have chosen what I consider a no less interesting topic, that is "Race and Language in Malta."