The Maltese language of Australia: Maltraljan. By Roderick Bovingdon. (Languages of the world 16.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2001. Pp. xii, 140. ISBN 3895863319. $40.

Reviewed by: The Maltese language of Australia: Maltraljan by Roderick Bovingdon Mohammed Sawaie The Maltese language of Australia: Maltraljan. By Roderick Bovingdon. (Languages of the world 16.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2001. Pp. xii, 140. ISBN 3895863319. $40. The author divides the contents of this monograph into six parts. The first five form the body of the work; the sixth is an elaborate subcategorized bibliography. In Part 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–10), Bovingdon states that the aim of his study is ‘to note and to record the manner in which the Maltese Language of Australia has evolved within its ambience . . . the Maltese Community of Australia’ (1). In Part 2, ‘The background’ (11–27), B provides a ‘historical synopsis’ (11) of the Maltese migration to Australia which started in 1882. Part 3, ‘The Maltese language in an Australian environment’ (28–39), presents a discussion of the Maltese language in Australia and the establishment in 1929 of Maltese journalism by Maltese immigrants. Part 4, ‘The glossary’ (37–123), is a compilation and analysis of ‘nine hundred or so’ headwords (9) of Australian Maltese (Matraljan). Finally, Part 5, ‘Synopsis and conclusions’ (124–28), is self-explanatory, comprising what is indicated by its designation. The corpus in this study was collected from spoken as well as written sources. In the spoken sources, B utilized data from living Maltese speakers, spoken words reported in the Australian Maltese press, his own audio recordings, and both oral history recordings and video interview recordings of older Maltese generations in Australia. The written documents drew on the Maltese Australian press, literary texts written in Australia, the author’s own published contributions, official governmental documents, and leaflets of Maltese Australian associations (2–4). The glossary items are divided into a six-tier classification with special designation as to whether these words are written or spoken (7–9). In this categorization, for purposes of ascertaining the authenticity of such items as Australian Maltese, B uses as a reference Joseph Aquilina’s Maltese-English dictionary (Malta: Midsea Books Ltd., 1987–90.), ‘the most authoritative Maltese lexical reference to date’ (37). This monograph contributes to the study of language contact, as well as language maintenance and [End Page 615] language shift, areas which were pioneered respectively by Uriel Weinreich and Joshua Fishman in their attempts to study linguistic change and retention of linguistic features, including lexical, among immigrants in a host language environment. Consequently, B’s monograph is a valuable study in its contribution to better familiarity with Maltese outside of its environment, the Maltese Islands. B has coined the term ‘Maltraljan’ to designate Australian Maltese as a language as opposed to speakers of Maltese in Australia, an adjectival form similar to the widely used ‘Westralian’ (for Western Australian) (4, n. 14). Since this is an important coinage used by B throughout his study, one would expect it to have been introduced and explained at first mention. I have found that various textual errors detract from the quality of this work overall: the prose is uneven, at times awkward; the punctuation marks, especially commas, are often misplaced, thus leading to infelicities or ambiguities. Careful editorial attention could have avoided some orthographic and typographical errors and run-on words. From pp. 130–39, the bottom page numbers were either partially, or wholly, cut off. Mohammed Sawaie University of Virginia Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America