When the Third Generation of Immigrants No Longer Speaks the Home Language, How Long Can the Mother Tongue Survive?

One Article to Understand How Overseas Associations Hold on to a Small Language

— Featured Reading Guide and Editorial Value of This Issue of Linguistic Exploration

eISSN 2759-7199  |  Publisher: Japan Bilingual Publishing Co.  《日本二语言出版社》

Official Website: https://ojs.bilpub.com/le

Volume 02 | Issue 01-02 | October 2025

On a weekend in Melbourne, inside an old Maltese club, white-haired elders sit around a table and chat in their hometown dialect about the old days after the Second World War; at the next table, their grandchildren are scrolling through their phones, occasionally tossing out a phrase or two of English to order food. Such scenes play out every day in immigrant communities around the world.

The question is: when immigration comes to a halt, and as the first generation gradually grows old, how long can that home language, carried across the ocean, hold out?

The featured paper in this issue, "The Contribution of Maltese Ethnic Associations and Clubs in Australia Towards the Community and Preservation of Maltese Language and Culture" (Adrian Muscat, Linguistic Exploration Vol. 2 No. 1-2, pp. 15-23), focuses on this very question. The author walks into Maltese associations and clubs in Melbourne and Sydney to find out: what have these old places—treated by immigrants as a "second home"—actually done for the continuation of their mother tongue and culture, and what have they failed to do?

In selecting this paper, the journal is not merely presenting the dialect story of a diasporic community, but answering a fundamental question: as language is lost at accelerating speed through migration, where should an international journal stand?

I. The Article Itself: Decomposing "Three Generations of Silence" into a Researchable Object

01. Why Is Maltese "Nearly Unspoken" in Australia?

Some background first. Malta is a small island nation in the Mediterranean, and Maltese is the only official language in the European Union rooted in the Semitic language family, yet it is written in the Latin alphabet—a "small yet distinctive" language in its own right. After the Second World War, large numbers of Maltese crossed the ocean to make a living in Australia.

But the paper points out that the immigration flow from Malta to Australia has now in effect stopped. With no new people coming in and the older generation passing away, the entire Maltese-descended community naturally grows smaller and older. Even more troublesome is the broader environment: Australia is an English-speaking country, where English is the absolute dominant language of work, school, and media, leaving Maltese with almost "no place to be used" in daily life. Compounding this, the homeland lies more than ten thousand kilometers away, and returning is not easy. As the author states plainly in the abstract: the dominance of English, combined with the distance from the motherland, "is not a good omen" for the future survival of the Maltese language and culture. A small language, squeezed from two sides—the situation is easy to imagine.

02. Across Three Generations, How Does the Mother Tongue Slip Away Bit by Bit?

The most compelling part of the paper draws the language situation of three generations of immigrants as a clear downhill slope.

The first generation is the cohort forced to leave the island after the Second World War; they grew up speaking Maltese and genuinely cherish their culture. The second generation, born in Australia, the paper finds, "usually understand it, but have neither the opportunity nor the desire to speak it outside the family"—they understand but do not speak, which is the most dangerous signal in language transmission. By the third generation, Australian-born young people basically do not speak Maltese anymore, leaving behind only a "residue" of culture.

This is classic language shift: it is not that one generation suddenly decides to stop speaking, but that every generation quietly steps back a little; after three generations, the language has essentially withdrawn from daily life. The culture remains, but the words are gone.

03. What Are Those Old Associations and Clubs Actually Doing?

Immigrants naturally do not just sit by and watch. The Maltese-descended community in Australia has its own ethnic associations and clubs, and the paper turns its lens precisely on these organizations. They are the social centers of the community: gatherings, festivals, performances, home-flavored food, and even church activities often revolve around these clubs. The related research cited in the paper even summarizes the clubs' routine activities with the phrase "guitars, bingo, and drama."

These places matter because they give the diaspora a corner of "their own people," a place where homesickness can settle. After conducting interviews, the author reaches an impressive conclusion: although the community is aging, many Maltese Australians still hold a strong sense of Maltese cultural identity. That is to say, the clubs have succeeded in "preserving the culture"—belonging, festival memories, and ethnic identity are all still alive.

04. Why Can They Keep the Culture but Not the Language?

But the problem lies precisely here. The paper's conclusion is a little sobering: the shell of culture is still there, but the roots of the language are loosening.

Why? Because culture consists of visible, tangible symbols—a dish, a song, a festival—that the third generation can still participate in and enjoy; but language is a muscle that must be exercised daily, and it atrophies when unused. Children speak English at school, at work, and online; and if parents do not insist on the mother tongue at home, Maltese has no "practice field." Understanding but not speaking is, in essence, a language degrading from "productive capacity" to "passive comprehension."

The author thereby reminds us: social gatherings of hometown speech in clubs alone cannot carry the intergenerational transmission of a language. Culture can live on memory, but language can only live on use.

05. On Whom Does the Future of This Small Language Depend?

The value of this paper extends beyond Maltese itself. It actually poses a common question to all diasporic groups: when the migration flow stops, the transmission of the mother tongue cannot rest solely on the nostalgia of the elderly. Academia has long had mature frameworks of language maintenance and language shift, and Australia itself is a stronghold of community language research, having produced many longitudinal studies on Italian-, Greek-, and Croatian-descended communities.

The related research cited in the paper indicates that truly effective transmission requires systematic forces—community language schools, the "mother-tongue insistence" within families, social contexts where the younger generation is willing to speak, and even today's digital tools may all become the hand that holds up the small language. For overseas Chinese communities, the intergenerational decline of dialects and Mandarin follows the same script. The club is a lifeboat, but for a language to truly make it ashore, the whole society must give it a place where it is "needed."

II. Why LE Selected This Article for This Issue

LE's editorial mission is clearly stated: to understand language as "a complex dynamic system deeply rooted in human cognition, society, and culture," to encourage cross-fertilization between different branches and methodologies of linguistics, and to attend to language diversity and the documentation of endangered languages.

In the past, diasporic language research has often been cut into pieces too finely:

• Sociolinguistics discusses language attitudes but says little about the actual functions of community organizations;

• Anthropology studies diasporic identity but says little about the intergenerational decline of language competence;

• Education studies community language schools but often detaches from the broader migration history.

This paper happens to fill exactly the position where LE most needs to contribute: migration history → community functions → three-generation language decline → the mismatch between cultural preservation and language loss → systematic transmission pathways. It reframes the "hometown speech in old clubs" from a nostalgic narrative into the academic proposition of "how a language, as a dynamic system, decays and persists in the diaspora"—precisely the core concern of this journal's Aims & Scope.

III. The Value and Significance of Publishing This Article

1. Turning the "homesickness" of diasporic communities into an academic topic. "The third generation no longer speaks the home language" is a hidden pain of countless immigrant families; this article structures it through the language-shift framework, the three-generation decline model, and the analysis of community functions, bringing individual experience into a citable and comparable academic discourse space.

2. Echoing the journal's mission of "language diversity and the documentation of endangered languages." LE explicitly includes endangered languages and language diversity within its scope of submissions. The predicament of Maltese in Australia is a microcosm of the diasporic survival of small languages worldwide. Selecting this article is an empirical response to the shared human question of "why languages disappear and how to save them."

3. Setting a benchmark for the "sociolinguistics / language contact" section. The article combines fieldwork, in-depth interviews, literature review, and policy recommendations, offering future contributors a clear paradigm: starting from real communities and returning to theoretical renewal and practical intervention.

IV. Contribution to the Journal's Development: Uniqueness, Distinctiveness, and Innovation

The table below sets out, across three core dimensions, the direct contribution and highlights of this article to LE's development.

 

4. Communication and attraction of cross-cultural readers. Overseas Chinese communities, immigrant families, and dialect preservationists are all natural readers of this article. The pain point of "the third generation no longer speaks the home language" cuts across all diasporic languages—Maltese, Chinese dialects, Italian, Greek, and more. The combination of a soft-feature guide with rigorous scholarship can simultaneously attract young university sociolinguistics/anthropology teachers, master's and doctoral students, leaders of overseas Chinese community organizations, and language preservation nonprofit groups. First be read, then be cited. With the OA attribute multiplied by social media dissemination, visibility keeps expanding.

5. Disciplinary institution-building: filling in the skeleton of "diasporic language sociology." This article implicitly completes a thread: the halt of the migration flow → community aging → associations preserve culture but struggle to preserve language → three-generation decline model → systematic transmission pathways. Future researchers will follow this line to write reviews, establish curricula, and carry out community intervention, with the source anchored in LE Vol. 2 No. 1-2.

V. Conclusion: Selecting This Article Means Answering a Question

The disappearance of a language is never a single thunderclap, but the silence of three generations.

LE's selection of this study from Australia is not meant to dramatize pathos, but to answer:

As language is lost at accelerating speed through migration, how should linguistics, as a discipline, catch hold of this passing-away?

The answer lies in five words: community, generation, use, system, and persistence. The clubs have kept the warmth of culture, but a language can live only through daily use. And Linguistic Exploration is the academic field site that records this complexity—tenderly taking inventory of every star in the firmament of human culture that should not be allowed to go out.

This is the value of this featured reading guide, and the very reason this journal exists.

References

[1] Muscat, A. (2025). The Contribution of Maltese Ethnic Associations and Clubs in Australia Towards the Community and Preservation of Maltese Language and Culture. Linguistic Exploration, 2(1-2), 15-23. https://doi.org/10.55121/le.v2i1.308

[2] Fishman, J. (1964). Language Maintenance and Language Shift as a Field of Inquiry. Linguistics, 2(9), 32-70.

[3] Pauwels, A. (2016). Language Maintenance and Shift. Cambridge University Press.

[4] Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2021). Census of Population and Housing. Canberra.

[5] Clyne, M. (1991). Community Languages—The Australian Experience. Cambridge University Press.

Appendix: Journal Information