maltese writers developed an uninterrupted local "italian" literary movement which went on up to about four decades ago, whereas maltese as a literary idiom started to coexist on a wide scale in the last decades of the 19th century. whilst maltese has the historical priority on the level of the spoken language, italian has the priority of being the almost exclusive written medium, for the socio-cultural affairs, for the longest period. the native tongue had only to wait for the arrival of a new mentality which could integrate an unwritten, popular tradition with a written, academically respectable one.