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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 42:3 (2021) ► pp.245–272

Rethinking Maltese English as a continuum of sociolinguistic continua through evaluations of written and oral prompts

| L-Università ta’ Malta
| Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma (UNINT)

Scientific literature has tackled Maltese English (MaltE) mainly in the framework of World Englishes in order to focus on its features compared to other varieties of English around the world. In this paper we shed more light on MaltE by proposing a sociolinguistic perspective, oriented towards its social stratification, and by referring to it through degrees of linguistic competence in English. We therefore propose two continua of variation: MaltE as an L2 continuum and as a situational one. Within this framework, we identify two groups defined as Mainly Maltese Speakers (MMS) and Mainly English Speakers (MES). We suggest that MaltE can be interpreted both as an L2, and as a variety used according to speech events, domain, participants, in-groupness etc. To investigate this we carried out a perceptual experiment involving two groups of university students, specialising in Maltese and English respectively. We discuss the results based on ratings and evaluations of authentic MaltE written and spoken prompts.

Keywords: Maltese English, sociolinguistics, L2 varieties, variational patterns, bilingual competence
Article outline
  • 1.Historical and contextual considerations on language use in Malta
  • 2.Features of Maltese English
  • 3.Maltese English as a continuum of sociolinguistic continua
  • 4.Methodology: Ratings and comments on Maltese English written and oral prompts
  • 5.Qualitative results
    • 5.1Written prompts
    • 5.2Oral prompts
      • 5.2.1ORP1
      • 5.2.2ORP2
      • 5.2.3ORP3
      • 5.2.4ORP4
  • 6.Quantitative results
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Sociolinguistic variation and the situational continuum
    • 7.2The L2 continuum
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00072.car
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