Last Sunday, the Labour Party Leader and Prime Minister hosted a crowd of Labourites along with a couple of government executives who work in the public cultural entities. They supposedly discussed Maltese culture and language, but much of it consisted of Labour executives making absurd statements, like Jason Micallef, who claimed that Strait Street’s nightlife was Malta’s greatest cultural achievement in years. They even brought Gladys to the event to ensure that someone other than journalists would actually listen to this nonsense.
What stood out most in the event, however, was Maris Camilleri’s discourse, which was intelligent but problematic for many reasons.
Maris Camilleri is a successful academic and linguist abroad, who was appointed by the government as the head of the newly created Maltese Language Centre. I don’t know on what criteria they chose her, but I think that the government may have identified a successful academic abroad and selected her simply because she looks and sounds intelligent (she in fact is). Sometimes, Labour politicians feel the need to hire intelligent people to avoid looking completely stupid.
What I find problematic of course, is that academics are not executives, and policy-making is different from policy-execution. She is in a position which requires policy execution and in this field she seems to have nothing prepared. During the event she spoke about the Maltese Language Centre producing products about the Maltese language which would generally be produced by local publishers.
The Maltese Language Centre shouldn’t be thinking about promoting the Maltese language centre in marketing and educational terms because there are already many institutions and industry participants which carry this role. What the institute should do is tackle the language issue from a structural and macro-perspective as government entities are expected to. Otherwise, the Maltese Language Centre will become just another government body driven by vanity and filled with fake jobs.
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