Maltese Surnames in Australia -- Kunjomijiet Maltin fl-Awstralja

Maltese Surnames in Australia

 

Recently, my wife arrived back home from work.  I realised something had happened, as she was muttering under her breath.

 

I asked her straight away what had happened, and that's what she was waiting for!

 

She works in a pharmacy in Toongabbie, where many Maltese are clients, some of whom ask for her to be served.  One female client had her surname Buttiġieġ, and my wife called her by her surname to pick up the medicine she had ordered.

 

One of her colleagues, and immigrant like her and myself, told her in English, that that was not the right way to pronounce the surname, which was Butt-ee-gig, as that was how the client had pronounced it.  My wife told her that the Maltese method of pronunciation was Boot-ee-gee-g, but her colleague did not seem to accept this.

 

My wife continued sadly that the majority of Maltese that go there don't help in providing the right pronunciation, as they use an Anglicised version of the surname.  Hence Baldacchino is pronounced Bal-da-chee-no instead of Bal-dak-ki-no, Borġ is pronounced Bor-g instead of Bor-ch, Grech sounds like Gre-ch instead of Gre-k, Ebejer becomes E-be-ger instead of E-be-ear, and the list never ends.

 

The extreme case occurs when surnames are even formally changed, that is not only do they sound different but also are written differently from the original, like Mercieca which changes to Mercia, Bajada becoming Baiada, etc.

 

Naturally, I do understand the difficulty in people born with the primary language being English pronouncing Maltese surnames.  This is caused by Maltese surnames being written to follow Italian phonetics.

 

In order to explain myself, consider the Italian word 'chi', which is translated to min in Maltese and 'who' in English, which sounds like 'key' in Italian, however English speakers who have words like 'cheetah', pronounce it as 'chee'.  This explains why my surname Cauchi is pronounced by Australians as Cow-chee and not Cow-key as the Maltese do.

 

There are various other letters in Maltese that sound very different to their equivalent in English, like the 'j', 'q' and others, which my Maltese students quickly find out.

 

I've heard many Maltese people here in Australia (and probably any other country with a substantial Maltese population) say they're fed up of not being understood when giving their name, or having to spell it every time, and so just pronounce it in Anglicised form.

 

This process was probably also influenced by the immigration policy by the Australian governments, in the period when immigration from Malta reached its peak, that is after the Second World War.  This policy, called assimilation, aimed for immigrants slowly becoming similar to English-origin Australians in values, behaviour, way of life and ultimately, speech1.

 

The pressure on the Maltese to become accepted in a society that derogatively called them 'wogs' couldn't have been small, and one thing that made them different without a doubt was their surname.

 

I have to say that this process is also evident in other cultures, sometimes manifestly more extreme especially in Asian immigrants, where people commonly have an English name apart from their Asian one, and quote the former and not the latter.

 

In my experience in with world of work here, I can say my colleagues used to do everything they could to pronounce my name correctly.  My name Ivan in English sounds Aye-vin (rather than Ee-vun), and I used to appreciate my colleagues try to pronounce my name in the Maltese traditional way, and keep trying until they got it.  I remember feeling really grateful they took the time to do so - perhaps I was lucky to have colleagues who were open to other cultures.

 

My fellow Maltese, my hope is to treasure our name and how it sounds in our language, as this is unique in this world, and a small part of the tremendous heritage we carry from that island in the middle of the Mediterranean, so brimming with cultural wealth.

 

I'm proud to be called Ivan, and that it sounds Ee-vun and not Aye-vin.

1Class and Class Conflict in Australia; Longman, 1996: Migrants and Class in Postwar Australia; Robert Tierney -  available at http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/migrants.htm, retrieved 8/3/2015