Bilingualism : the Gozo and Malta divide

Abstract

The purpose of my thesis is to discover whether Malta is a truly bilingual country. As Mackey (cited in Romaine, 1995:24) has claimed there is an extreme gap between what a country is supposed to be, and that which it in fact is (de jure) versus (de facto). Since the true foundations of a society always lie in its educational system, in my study, I am going to investigate the use of Maltese and English in the Maltese educational system. In this dissertation, several topics and aspects concerning bilingualism will be expiated such as Bilingualism in the Maltese Community, Code-Switching in the Maltese Society, The Language Varieties found in Malta and Gozo and Bilingualism in relation to the Maltese Educational system. There are several questions, which I hope to answer, amongst which are: Are Maltese pupils truly able to switch from one language to another and speak both English and Maltese fluently when the need arises? What are the Maltese students' perceptions of the languages they are being taught? What do they think of those people who continuously use English and also those who resort to code-switching all the time? Is it true that the people who code-switch do so, because of a lack of proficiency in either language?