Maltese (, also or ) is a Central Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic. It is the only Semitic language officially written in the Latin script. It is spoken by the Maltese people and is a national language of Malta, and is the only official Semitic and Afroasiatic language of the European Union. The pioneering Maltese linguists Canon Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis and Mikiel Anton Vassalli both mistakenly hypothesised that Maltese originated from the Punic language. Later scholars like John L. Hayes considered it to be descended from a North African dialect of Colloquial Arabic, which was introduced to Malta when the Aghlabids captured it in the 9th century. However, genetic studies and historical evidence have established that Malta was depopulated after that raid, and that the island was subsequently repopulated by settlers from Sicily and Calabria who spoke Siculo-Arabic, which had developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianisation of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of Latinisation.: "Originally Maltese was an Arabic dialect, but it was immediately exposed to Latinisation because the Normans conquered the islands in 1090, while Christianisation, which was complete by 1250, cut off the dialect from contact with Classical Arabic. Consequently Maltese developed on its own, slowly but steadily absorbing new words from Sicilian and Italian according to the needs of the developing community." It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage. Maltese is also distinguished from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages, namely Italian and Sicilian.
The original Arabic base comprises around one-third of the Maltese vocabulary, especially words that denote basic ideas and the function words,: "An analysis of the etymology of the 41,000 words in Aquilina's Maltese-English Dictionary shows that 32.41% are of Arabic origin, 52.46% are from Sicilian and Italian, and 6.12% are from English. Although nowadays we know that all languages are mixed to varying degrees, this is quite an unusual formula. However, the words derived from Arabic are more frequent because they denote the basic ideas and include the function words." but about half of the vocabulary is derived from standard Italian and Sicilian; and English words make up 6–20% of the vocabulary. A 2016 study shows that, in terms of basic everyday language, speakers of Maltese are able to understand less than a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic and Libyan Arabic, which are Maghrebi Arabic dialects related to Siculo-Arabic, whereas speakers of Tunisian Arabic and Libyan Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese. This reported level of asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between mainstream varieties of Arabic.
Maltese has always been written in the Latin script, the earliest surviving example dating from the late Middle Ages. It is the only standardised Semitic language written exclusively in the Latin script.
History
The origins of the Maltese language are attributed to the arrival, early in the 11th century, of settlers from neighbouring Sicily, where Siculo-Arabic was spoken, reversing the Fatimid Caliphate's conquest of the island at the end of the 9th century.
The Norman conquest in 1091, followed by the expulsion of the Muslims, complete by 1249, permanently isolated the vernacular from its Arabic source, creating the conditions for its evolution into a distinct language. In contrast to Sicily, where Siculo-Arabic became extinct and was replaced by Sicilian, the vernacular in Malta continued to develop alongside Italian, eventually replacing it as official language in 1934, alongside English. The first written reference to the Maltese language is in a will of 1436, where it is called . The oldest known document in Maltese, () by Pietru Caxaro, dates from the 15th century.
The earliest known Maltese dictionary was a 16th-century manuscript entitled "Maltese-Italiano"; it was included in the of Mifsud in 1764, but is now lost. A list of Maltese words was included in both the (1603) and (1606) of Hieronymus Megiser, who had visited Malta in 1588–1589; Domenico Magri gave the etymologies of some Maltese words in his (1677).
An early manuscript dictionary, , was discovered in the in Rome in the 1980s, together with a grammar, the , attributed to a French knight named Thezan. The first systematic lexicon is that of Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis, who also wrote the first systematic grammar of the language and proposed a standard orthography.
The use of the language declined heavily under the British administration of Malta compared with English. Following the independence of Malta, language reforms under the Dom Mintoff government saw the language increase in use and today it is used regularly in Malta.
Demographics
Ethnologue reports a total of Maltese speakers: in Malta and in the diaspora. Most speakers also use English, usually the local dialect known as Maltese English.
The largest diaspora community of Maltese speakers is in Australia, with 36,000 speakers reported in 2006 (down from 45,000 in 1996, and expected to decline further)."As at the 2006 Australian Census, the number of Australians speaking Maltese at home was 36,514, compared to 41,250 in 2001 and 45,243 in 1996. The 2006 figures represent a drop of 19.29% when compared with the 1996 figures. Given that many of those who speak Maltese at home are over the age of 60, the number of Maltese speakers will invariably go for a nosedive by 2016." Joseph Carmel Chetcuti, Why It's time to bury the Maltese language in Australia , Malta Independent, 2 March 2010.
The Maltese linguistic community in Tunisia originated in the 18th century. Numbering several thousand in the 19th century, it was reported to be only 100 to 200 people as of 2017.Nigel Mifsud, Malta's Ambassador meets Maltese who have lived their whole life in Tunisia , TVM, 13 November 2017.
Classification Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family.Merritt Ruhlen. 1991. A Guide to the World's Languages, Volume 1: Classification. Stanford.David Dalby. 2000. The Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities. Linguasphere Observatory.Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th ed. Summer Institute of Linguistics.Alan S. Kaye & Judith Rosenhouse. 1997. "Arabic Dialects and Maltese", The Semitic Languages. Ed. Robert Hetzron. Routledge. Pages 263–311. In the course of its history, Maltese has been influenced by Sicilian, Italian, to a lesser extent by Norman, and, more recently, English. Today, the core vocabulary (including both the most commonly used vocabulary and function words) is Semitic, with a large number of loanwords. Due to the Sicilian influence on Siculo-Arabic, Maltese has many language contact features and is most commonly described as a language with a large number of loanwords.
Maltese has historically been classified in various ways, with some arguing that it was derived from ancient Punic (another Semitic language) instead of Siculo-Arabic, and others arguing it is one of the Berber languages (another language family within Afroasiatic). Implausibly, Fascist Italy classified it as regional Italian.
Dialects
Urban varieties of Maltese are closer to Standard Maltese than rural varieties,Isserlin. Studies in Islamic History and Civilization. BRILL 1986, which have some characteristics that distinguish them from Standard Maltese. They tend to show some archaic features such as the realisation of and and the imāla of Arabic ā into ē (or ī especially in Gozo), considered archaic because they are reminiscent of 15th-century transcriptions of this sound. Another archaic feature is the realisation of Standard Maltese ā as ō in rural dialects. There is also a tendency to diphthongise simple vowels, e.g. ū becomes eo or eu. Rural dialects also tend to employ more Semitic roots and broken plurals than Standard Maltese. In general rural Maltese is less distant from its Siculo-Arabic ancestor than is Standard Maltese.
Phonology
Consonants + Consonant phonemes Labial Dental/AlveolarPostalveolar Palatal Velar Pharyngeal Glottal Nasal Plosive Affricate t͡ʃ d͡ʒ Fricative Trill Approximant
Voiceless stops are only lightly aspirated and voiced stops are fully voiced. Voicing is carried over from the last segment in obstruent clusters; thus, two- and three-obstruent clusters are either voiceless or voiced throughout, e.g. is realised "we write". (Similar assimilation phenomena occur in languages such as French and Czech.) Maltese has final-obstruent devoicing of voiced obstruents and word-final voiceless stops have no audible release, making voiceless–voiced pairs phonetically indistinguishable in word-final position.
Gemination is distinctive word-medially and word-finally in Maltese. The distinction is most rigid intervocalically after a stressed vowel. Stressed, word-final closed syllables with short vowels end in a long consonant, and those with a long vowel in a single consonant; the only exception is where historic and meant the compensatory lengthening of the succeeding vowel. Some speakers have lost length distinction in clusters.
The two nasals and assimilate for place of articulation in clusters. and are usually dental, whereas are all alveolar. are found mostly in words of Italian origin, retaining length (if not word-initial). and are only found in loanwords, e.g. gazzetta "newspaper" and televixin "television". The pharyngeal fricative is velar (), uvular (), or glottal () for some speakers.
Vowels +Vowel phonemesFrontCentralBackCloseNear-closeOpen-midNear-openDiphthongs Maltese has five short vowels, , written a e i o u; six long vowels, , written a, e, ie, i, o, u, all of which (with the exception of ie ) can be known to represent long vowels in writing only if they are followed by an orthographic għ or h (otherwise, one needs to know the pronunciation; e.g. nar (fire) is pronounced ); and seven diphthongs, , written aj or għi, aw or għu, ej or għi, ew, iw, oj, and ow or għu.
Historical phonology The Maltese consonant system has undergone several changes when compared with Classical Arabic: Classical ArabicLetter RomanisationtṭṯdḍḏẓsṣḥẖʿġʾqhPronunciationMalteseLetterT tD dS sĦ ħGħ għQ qH hPronunciation While many of these changes (chiefly the merger of emphatic consonants with their non-pharyngealised counterparts) are the result of European influence, others (such as the merger of into ) are found in other varieties of Arabic, and may be either independent developments or features of the Sicilian Arabic dialect which Maltese descends from.
Orthography
Alphabet
The modern system of Maltese orthography was introduced in 1924. Below is the Maltese alphabet, with IPA symbols and approximate English pronunciation: