Gozitan dialects are changing, but they are still very much alive, researcher says

Gozitan dialects are changing, with some traditional features disappearing among younger speakers, but important elements remain firmly alive, according to linguistic researcher Maria Lipnicka.

A researcher at Heidelberg University, Lipnicka has spent years studying Gozitan dialects, with particular attention to a linguistic phenomenon known as “pausal forms”.

Speaking to GozoToday, Lipnicka said her interest in Gozitan speech began during her university studies, when she encountered research on Maltese pausal forms by her teacher and supervisor Alexander Borg, a professor of semitic languages at the Ben Gurion University in Israel.

She was impressed by the linguistic variety found within such a small geographical area.

“When I later started doing fieldwork in Gozo myself, I realised that these forms were not just something I knew from descriptions of ancient languages such as Biblical Hebrew, they were still very much alive in everyday speech,” she said.

What are pausal forms?

Pausal forms are particular pronunciations that occur when a word comes before a pause, such as at the end of a sentence or phrase.

Lipnicka said the same word can therefore sound slightly different depending on whether it occurs in the middle of a phrase or immediately before a pause.

One particularly feature found in Gozitan is what linguists call “pausal diphthongisation.”

This can see a vowel that is normally pronounced as a steady sound change into a diphthong, a moving vowel sound, before a pause.

Examples include forms such as ommoj#, kbejr# and tabojb#, compared with ommi, kbir and tabib when the words occur without a pause.

For Lipnicka, the phenomenon is particularly fascinating because it sits at the intersection of sound, rhythm and meaning.

“There is something poetic, or even musical, about them: a word can change its sound simply because it comes before silence, a little like the end of a verse in poetry or a cadence in music,” she said.

Pausal forms eventually became the subject of her Master’s thesis before becoming part of a joint research project with Professor Maciej Klimiuk and later her PhD research.

The phenomenon is also unusual in the wider western north African dialect group, although comparable pausal phenomena have been documented in some Lebanese and Syro-Palestinian dialects.

Why do Gozitans change their accent in Malta?

Lipnicka’s research also looked at how Gozitan speakers modify their speech depending on who they are speaking to and where they are.

She stressed that adapting one’s speech to different situations is normal and happens across languages and communities.

In Gozo, however, there are additional social factors. Standard Maltese is the variety encountered in education, the media and many public and institutional settings, while Gozitan dialects are more strongly associated with the home village and local community.

Some people interviewed by Lipnicka also recalled being teased or mocked for their Gozitan accent when working in Malta.

Moving towards Standard Maltese in such circumstances can therefore be a way of adapting to a particular setting, avoiding unwanted attention or facilitating communication, she explained.

Rather than describing this as people “giving up” their dialect, Lipnicka said it is more accurately understood as linguistic accommodation.

‘There is no single Gozitan attitude towards dialect’

Lipnicka also encountered negative attitudes towards local speech during her fieldwork.

Some speakers described their dialect in negative terms or worried that it did not sound “proper” or “polite”, using expressions such as imgħawweġ or mhux bil-polejt#.

In some cases, speakers became more conscious of their dialect as soon as they realised, they were being recorded and began moving towards Standard Maltese.

That creates a particular challenge for dialect researchers, Lipnicka explained, because people who monitor their own speech may no longer speak in the way they naturally would at home.

But such attitudes were far from universal. Lipnicka also encountered many people who were extremely proud of their dialect and keen to pass it on to younger generations.

“There is no single ‘Gozitan attitude’ towards dialect,” she said, pointing to differences linked to factors including generation, mobility, occupation and social networks.

She therefore cautions against reducing attitudes towards dialect to a simple question of pride versus shame. “The picture is much more complex,” she said.

Some traditional features are disappearing

Lipnicka compared contemporary recordings with recordings made around 50 years earlier, including material recorded by Patrick Formosa in the 1970s.

Her research into the dialect of Għarb found that some older features have disappeared among younger speakers.

One example concerns one of the two historical sounds represented in Maltese by the letter ‘għ’ (għajn).

In words such as Għawdex, Għarb and il-għudwa, the sound could traditionally be pronounced somewhat like a French r.

Lipnicka said she continued to find this pronunciation among older speakers, but not among younger generations.

Other features have proved considerably more resilient. The retroflex ‘r’ associated with the western Gozitan dialect group remains well preserved, including among younger speakers.

This is significant, she said, because the sound has sometimes been assumed to have been influenced by English.

Her research instead indicates that it is a genuine feature of the western Gozitan dialect group.

‘I could hear children using pausal forms in the streets’

Perhaps the most encouraging finding for Lipnicka has been the survival of pausal forms themselves. These are not merely linguistic relics preserved in old recordings or restricted to elderly speakers.

“When I visited Gozo again this June, I could hear children and young people using pausal forms naturally in the streets,” she said.

For a dialectologist, she added, this is one of the clearest indications that a linguistic feature continues to be passed naturally from one generation to another.

Lipnicka therefore urges caution when describing Gozitan dialects as being in the process of disappearing. Some individual features have undoubtedly been lost, while others may be becoming less frequent.

But the continued use of pausal forms among younger speakers suggests that important elements of the dialect system remain in everyday use.

“Gozitan dialects are changing, as all living varieties do, but they are still very much alive,” Lipnicka said.

Lipnicka has also produced a short video explaining pausal forms, available on YouTube.