Maltese

Why Maltese came from Sicily rather than Tunisia

Early Maltese linguists, Agius de Soldanis and Mikiel Anton Vassalli among them, believed the language went back to Punic. Later writers traced it to a North African Arabic brought by the Aghlabids, who took the island in the 9th century. Genetic studies and historical evidence point elsewhere. Malta was depopulated after that raid and resettled from Sicily and Calabria by speakers of Siculo-Arabic, a Maghrebi dialect that grew up in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091.

The Norman conquest of 1091, and the expulsion of the Muslims that was complete by 1249, cut the vernacular off from Arabic. In Sicily, Sicilian replaced Siculo-Arabic. In Malta it survived and developed beside Italian. It has no diglossic tie to Classical or Modern Standard Arabic, and it is classified apart from the 30 varieties that make up the Arabic macrolanguage. Fascist Italy, implausibly, filed it as regional Italian.

What the Maltese vocabulary is made of

About a third of the words are Arabic, and they include the function words and the words for basic ideas. About half come from standard Italian and Sicilian. English supplies between 6% and 20%, a range that depends on whether a dictionary admits recent loans. The two layers sit side by side: tweġiba, from Arabic, and risposta, from Italian, both mean "answer".

A 2016 study measured how far the Arabic core still carries. Maltese speakers understood less than a third of what was said to them in Tunisian and Libyan Arabic. Speakers of those dialects understood about 40% of Maltese.

How the Maltese alphabet was settled

The earliest written reference to the language is a will of 1436 that calls it lingua maltensi, and the oldest known text is Il-Kantilena by Pietru Caxaro, from the 15th century. Under the Knights Hospitaller, official papers were kept in French and Italian. Philologists of the late 18th and 19th centuries worked to standardise the written form, always in Latin letters.

The modern orthography dates from 1924, when the Akkademja tal-Malti's rulebook, Tagħrif fuq il-Kitba Maltija, was first printed by the government press. Supplements followed in 1984 and 1992. The National Council for the Maltese Language is now the main regulator, and the academy's spelling rules still stand. Grave accents on final vowels mark words of Italian origin, such as kafè and però.

Where Maltese is used today

Use of the language declined under British administration and rose again after independence. Television from Malta broadcasts in English or Maltese, and newspapers are split roughly evenly between the two. Online the balance tips the other way: in 2011, 6.5% of Maltese internet users reported using Maltese online. In Australia 36,000 speakers were counted in 2006, and the community in Tunisia, several thousand strong in the 19th century, numbered 100 to 200 people in 2017.