Youths most likely to fancy ‘being born and raised’ anywhere but Malta: national poll

A quarter of Maltese people wish that they were born and raised in another country, the 2024 State of the Nation survey shows.

The study shows that the share of people who wish that they weren’t born and raised in Malta is at an all-time high, jumping from 6.3% in 2021 to 25% this year. The survey notes that 42.7% of people under 25 years old are the most likely to wish that they were born elsewhere. 

The survey says that, “This could be due to the fact that the population keeps increasing due to the influx of foreigners coming to Malta,” however there was no explanation behind this suggestion.

Meanwhile, those who responded that they wouldn’t want to have been born elsewhere dropped from 87.1% in 2021 to 70.5% in 2024. 

An age breakdown of the responses suggests that those over 66 years old are the happiest (82.9%) with the fact that they were born and raised in Malta. 

Meanwhile, there was a rise in people saying they primarily feel they’re a part of their locality rather than a part of Malta or the rest of Europe. This share of people increased from 22.5% in 2022 to 39.1% this year. 

A similar-sized share (40.4%) said that they mostly feel part of Malta as a whole, however this number has decreased slowly from 56.9% in 2022.  

One in five (20.5%) respondents primarily feel European. This figure dropped by around 5% since last year. 

Once again, the vast majority of respondents (71.3%) said that they consider Maltese as their primary language, although this figure keeps sinking year after year. In 2021, this figure stood at 82%, and dropped to 75.4% in 2023.

The number of people who consider English as their primary language jumped to 7.6% from 3.6% last year. Meanwhile, the share of people who consider both Maltese and English as their primary language stands at 20.3%, up from 16.7% in 2021.