Maltese language

"Malti" redirects here. For people with the name, see Malti (given name).

Maltese
Malti
Pronunciation[ˈmɐːltɪ]
Native toMalta
EthnicityMaltese
Native speakers
570,000 (2012)[1]
Early form
Dialects
Latin (Maltese alphabet)
Maltese Braille
Official status
Official language in
Malta
European Union
Regulated byNational Council for the Maltese Language
Il-Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Ilsien Malti
Language codes
ISO 639-1mt
ISO 639-2mlt
ISO 639-3mlt
Glottologmalt1254
Linguasphere12-AAC-c
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
A Maltese speaker, recorded in Malta

Maltese (Maltese: Malti, also L-Ilsien Malti or Lingwa Maltija) is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata. It is spoken by the Maltese people and is the national language of Malta,[3] and the only official Semitic and Afroasiatic language of the European Union. Maltese is considered a North African dialect of Colloquial Arabic that was brought to Malta by Arab and Berber (Aghlabids), who in 869/870 CE seized control of the island from the Byzantine Empire.[4] It is also said that it descents from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091.[5] As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of latinisation.[6][7] It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic.[8] 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.[9]

The original Arabic base comprises around one-third of the Maltese vocabulary, especially words that denote basic ideas and the function words,[10] but about half of the vocabulary is derived from standard Italian and Sicilian;[11] and English words make up between 6% and 20% of the vocabulary.[12] A 2016 study shows that, in terms of basic everyday language, speakers of Maltese are able to understand around a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic and Libyan Arabic,[13] which are Maghrebi Arabic dialects related to Siculo-Arabic,[14] whereas speakers of Tunisian Arabic and Libyan Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese.[15] This reported level of asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between other varieties of Arabic.[16]

Maltese has always been written in the Latin script, the earliest surviving example dating from the late Middle Ages.[17] It is the only standardised Semitic language written exclusively in the Latin script.[18]

  1. ^ Maltese at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Martine Vanhove, « De quelques traits prehilaliens en maltais » Archived 2022-10-15 at the Wayback Machine, in: Peuplement et arabisation au Maghreb cccidental : dialectologie et histoire, Casa Velazquez - Universidad de Zaragoza (1998), pp.97-108
  3. ^ "Constitution of Malta". Leġiżlazzjoni Malta. Archived from the original on 15 May 2019. Retrieved 3 December 2017.
  4. ^ Hayes, John (2001). "THE INTEGRATION OF ROMANCE VOCABULARY IN MALTESE". Romance Philology. 54 (2): 393.
  5. ^ So who are the 'real' Maltese. September 13, 2014. Archived from the original on 2016-03-12. The kind of Arabic used in the Maltese language is most likely derived from the language spoken by those that repopulated the island from Sicily in the early second millennium; it is known as Siculo-Arab. The Maltese are mostly descendants of these people. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  6. ^ Albert J. Borg; Marie Azzopardi-Alexander (1997). Maltese. Routledge. p. xiii. ISBN 978-0-415-02243-9. In fact, Maltese displays some areal traits typical of Maghrebine Arabic, although over the past 800 years of independent evolution it has drifted apart from Tunisian and Libyan Arabic
  7. ^ Brincat (2005): "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."
  8. ^ Hoberman, Robert D. (2007). "Chapter 13: Maltese Morphology". In Kaye, Alan S. (ed.). Morphologies of Asia and Africa. Vol. 1. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrown. p. 258. ISBN 9781575061092. Archived from the original on 2017-09-30. Maltese is the chief exception: Classical or Standard Arabic is irrelevant in the Maltese linguistic community and there is no diglossia.
  9. ^ Hoberman, Robert D. (2007). "Chapter 13: Maltese Morphology". In Kaye, Alan S. (ed.). Morphologies of Asia and Africa. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrown. pp. 257–258. ISBN 9781575061092. Archived from the original on 2017-09-30. yet it is in its morphology that Maltese also shows the most elaborate and deeply embedded influence from the Romance languages, Sicilian and Italian, with which it has long been in intimate contact.... As a result Maltese is unique and different from Arabic and other Semitic languages.
  10. ^ Brincat (2005): "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."
  11. ^ Brincat (2005).
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference autogenerated2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ "Mutual Intelligibility of Spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic and Tunisian Arabic Functionally Tested: A Pilot Study". p. 1. Archived from the original on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 23 September 2017. To summarise our findings, we might observe that when it comes to the most basic everyday language, as reflected in our data sets, speakers of Maltese are able to understand less than a third of what is being said to them in either Tunisian or Benghazi Libyan Arabic.
  14. ^ Borg, Albert J.; Azzopardi-Alexander, Marie (1997). Maltese. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02243-6.
  15. ^ "Mutual Intelligibility of Spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic and Tunisian Arabic Functionally Tested: A Pilot Study". p. 1. Archived from the original on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 23 September 2017. Speakers of Tunisian and Libyan Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is said to them in Maltese.
  16. ^ "Mutual Intelligibility of Spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic and Tunisian Arabic Functionally Tested: A Pilot Study". p. 1. Archived from the original on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 23 September 2017. In comparison, speakers of Libyan Arabic and speakers of Tunisian Arabic understand about two-thirds of what is being said to them.
  17. ^ The Cantilena. 2013-10-19. Archived from the original on 2015-12-08.
  18. ^ Il-Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Ilsien Malti. Archived from the original on 2014-01-06. Fundamentally, Maltese is a Semitic tongue, the same as Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Carthaginian and Ethiopian. However, unlike other Semitic languages, Maltese is written in the Latin alphabet, but with the addition of special characters to accommodate certain Semitic sounds. Nowadays, however, there is much in the Maltese language today that is not Semitic, due to the immeasurable Romantic influence from our succession of (Southern) European rulers through the ages.