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

Scientific literature has tackled Maltese English (MaltE) mainly in the framework of World Englishes in order to focuson its features compared to other varieties of English around the world. In this paper we shed more light on MaltE byproposing a sociolinguistic perspective, oriented towards its social stratification, and by referring to it through degreesof linguistic competence in English. We therefore propose two continua of variation: MaltE as a L2 continuum and as a situational one. Within this framework, we identify two groups defined as Mainly Maltese Speakers (MMS) andMainly English Speakers (MES). We suggest that MaltE can be interpreted both as a L2, and as a variety usedaccording to speech events, domain, participants, in-groupness etc. To investigate this we carried out a perceptualexperiment 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.