Maltese language · Lablypedia

The original Arabic base comprises around one-third of the Maltese vocabulary, especially words that denote basic ideas and 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 lingua maltensi. The oldest known document in Maltese, Il-Kantilena (Xidew il-Qada) 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 Biblioteca Maltese of Mifsud in 1764, but is now lost. A list of Maltese words was included in both the Thesaurus Polyglottus (1603) and Propugnaculum Europae (1606) of Hieronymus Megiser, who had visited Malta in 1588–1589; Domenico Magri gave the etymologies of some Maltese words in his Hierolexicon, sive sacrum dictionarium (1677).

An early manuscript dictionary, Dizionario Italiano e Maltese, was discovered in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome in the 1980s, together with a grammar, the Regole per la Lingua Maltese, 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.

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Demographics

Ethnologue reports a total of 530,000 Maltese speakers: 450,000 in Malta and 79,000 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).

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.

Classification

Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family. 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, which have some characteristics that distinguish them from Standard Maltese. They tend to show some archaic features such as the realisation of ⟨kh⟩ and ⟨gh⟩ 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

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

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:

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 ق 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:

Final vowels with grave accents (à, è, ì, ò, ù) are also found in some Maltese words, mostly of Italian origin, such as sigurtà (old Italian: sicurtà 'security'), kafè (Italian: caffè 'coffee'), Marì (a name), però (Italian: però 'but') and tiramisù (Italian: tiramisù 'tiramisu').

The official rules governing the structure of the Maltese language are recorded in the official guidebook Tagħrif fuq il-Kitba Maltija (English: Knowledge on Writing in Maltese) issued by the Akkademja tal-Malti (Academy of the Maltese language). The first edition of this book was printed in 1924 by the Maltese government's printing press. The rules were further expanded in the 1984 book, iż-Żieda mat-Tagħrif, which focused mainly on the increasing influence of Romance and English words. In 1992 the academy issued the Aġġornament tat-Tagħrif fuq il-Kitba Maltija, which updated the previous works.

The National Council for the Maltese Language (KNM) is the main regulator of the Maltese language (see Maltese Language Act, below). However, the academy's orthography rules are still valid and official.

Written Maltese

Since Maltese evolved after the Italo-Normans ended Arab rule of the islands, a written form of the language was not developed for a long time after the expulsion of the Arabs in the middle of the thirteenth century. Under the rule of the Knights Hospitaller, both French and Italian were used for official documents and correspondence. During the British colonial period, the use of English was encouraged through education, with Italian being regarded as the next most important language.

In the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century philologists and academics such as Mikiel Anton Vassalli made a concerted effort to standardise written Maltese. Many examples of written Maltese exist from before this period, always in the Latin alphabet, Il-Kantilena from the 15th century being the earliest example of written Maltese. In 1934 Maltese was recognised as an official language.

Samples

Maltese has both Semitic vocabulary and words derived from Romance languages, primarily Italian. Words such as tweġiba (Arabic origin) and risposta (Italian origin) have the same meaning ("answer") but are both used in Maltese, rather like "answer" and "response" in English. Below are two versions of the same translations, one with vocabulary mostly derived from Semitic root words and the other using Romance loanwords from the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe

Below is the Lord's Prayer in Maltese compared to other Semitic languages (Arabic and Syriac) with cognates highlighted:

Below is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Maltese compared to Arabic:

Vocabulary

Although the original vocabulary of Maltese was Siculo-Arabic, it has incorporated a large number of borrowings from Romance sources (Sicilian, Italian, and French) and, more recently, Germanic ones (from English).

The historical source of modern Maltese vocabulary is 52% Italian/Sicilian, 32% Arabic/Siculo-Arabic, 10% French and 6% English, with the remainder being Spanish and German. Today, most function words are Arabic, so despite only making up about a third of the vocabulary, they are the most used when speaking the language. In this way, Maltese is similar to English, a Germanic language that has been strongly influenced by Norman French and Latin (58% of English vocabulary).

As a result of this, Romance language-speakers (and to a lesser extent English speakers) can often easily understand more technical ideas expressed in Maltese, such as Ġeografikament, l-Ewropa hi parti tas-superkontinent tal-Ewrasja ('Geographically, Europe is part of the supercontinent of Eurasia'), while not understanding a single word of a basic sentence such as Ir-raġel qiegħed fid-dar ('The man is in the house'), which would be easily understood by any Arabic speaker.

Arabic

At the time Malta was thoroughly Arabized, the conquerors brought to the island the vulgar (colloquial) variant of Arabic, not the classical one (Classical Arabic); therefore, the Maltese language differs from Classical Arabic in the same way as the Arabic dialects differ from Classical Arabic. The Maltese language also comprises a considerable number of Maghrebi features, but in other ways, it can be closer to other Arabic dialects, or closer to Classical Arabic than to the other dialects as in the word ra ('to see'). While Arabic words represent roughly one-third of the Maltese lexicon, they comprise most of the language's core vocabulary, as well as most of its most frequently used words.

Żammit (2000) found that 40% of a sample of 1,821 Quranic Arabic roots were found in Maltese, considerably lower than that found in the Moroccan (58%) and Lebanese (72%) varieties of Arabic. An analysis of the etymology of the 41,000 words in Aquilina's Maltese–English Dictionary shows that 32% of the Maltese vocabulary is of Arabic origin. Usually, words expressing basic concepts and ideas, such as raġel (man), mara (woman), tifel (boy), dar (house), xemx (sun), and sajf (summer), are of Arabic origin. Moreover, belles-lettres in Maltese aim to maximise their use of vocabulary belonging to this group.

Notes: * from Arabic استقصى (istaqṣā) "to investigate", ** from Arabic اشتاق (ištāqa) "to yearn for ".

The following table compares additional cognates in Maltese and some other varieties of Arabic (all forms are written phonetically, as in the source):

Siculo-Arabic dialect which was spoken in Sicily and Malta is the ancestor of the Maltese language, some Siculo-Arabic words are still used in modern Sicilian (a Romance language spoken in Sicily):

The Maltese language has merged many of the original Arabic consonants (in particular the emphatic consonants) with others common to European languages. Thus, original Arabic , , and all merged into Maltese . The vowels, meanwhile, separated from the three in Classical Arabic () into five, as is more typical of many European languages (). Some unstressed short vowels have been elided. The common Arabic greeting as salāmu 'alaykum is cognate with is-sliem għalikom in Maltese (lit. "the peace for you", peace be with you), as are similar greetings in other Semitic languages (e.g. shalom ʿalekhem in Hebrew).

Romance (Sicilian, Italian, Spanish and French)

An analysis of the etymology of the 41,000 words in Aquilina's Maltese–English Dictionary shows that words of Romance origin make up 52% of the Maltese vocabulary, although other sources report percentages between 40% and 62%. Romance vocabulary tends to deal with more complex concepts. Most words come from Sicilian and thus exhibit Sicilian phonetic characteristics, such as rather than Italian , and rather than Italian (e.g. tiatru not teatro and fidi not fede). Also, as with Old Sicilian, (English sh) is written x and this produces spellings such as: ambaxxata ('embassy'), xena ('scene'; compare Italian ambasciata, scena).

A tendency in modern Maltese is to adopt further influences from English and Italian. Complex Latinate English words adopted into Maltese are often given Italian or Sicilian forms, even if the resulting words do not appear in either of those languages. For instance, the words evaluation, industrial action, and chemical armaments become evalwazzjoni, azzjoni industrjali, and armamenti kimiċi in Maltese, while the Italian terms are valutazione, vertenza sindacale, and armi chimiche respectively. (The origin of the terms may be narrowed even further to British English; the phrase industrial action is meaningless in the United States.) This is comparable to the situation with English borrowings into the Italo-Australian dialect. English words of Germanic origin are generally preserved relatively unchanged.

Some influences of African Romance on the Arabic and Berber spoken in the Maghreb are theorised; these may then have passed into Maltese. For example, in calendar month names, the word furar 'February' is only found in the Maghreb and in Maltese – proving the word's ancient pedigree. The region also has a form of another Latin month in awi/ussu < augustus. This word does not appear to be a loan word through Arabic, and may have been taken over directly from Late Latin or African Romance. Scholars theorise that a Latin-based system provided forms such as awi/ussu and furar in African Romance, with the system then mediating Latin/Romance names through Arabic for some month names during the Islamic period. The same situation exists for Maltese which mediated words from Italian, and retains both non-Italian forms such as awissu/awwissu and frar, and Italian forms such as april.

Berber

Like the Maghrebi Arabic dialects, Maltese has a significant vocabulary derived from Berber languages. Whether these words entered Maltese by being inherited from Siculo-Arabic or were directly borrowed from Berber languages is not yet known. These include:

English

English loanwords, which are becoming increasingly common, can make up between 6% and 20% of the Maltese vocabulary. This percentage discrepancy is due to the fact that a number of new English loanwords are sometimes not considered part of the official Maltese vocabulary, hence they are not included in certain dictionaries. Also, English loanwords of Latinate origin are very often Italianised, as discussed above. English loanwords are generally transliterated, although standard English pronunciation is virtually always retained. Below are a few examples:

"Fridge" is a common shortening of "refrigerator". "Refrigerator" is a Latinate word which could be imported into Maltese as rifriġeratur, whereas the Italian word is frigorifero or refrigeratore.

Calendar

The days of the week (Maltese: jiem il-ġimgħa) in Maltese, which are derived from Arabic, are referred to by number which is also typical in other Semitic languages, Days of the week are commonly preceded by the word nhar meaning 'day'.

The months of the year (Maltese: xhur is-sena) in Maltese are mostly derived from Sicilian, though Frar and Awwissu may be derived from African Romance via Siculo-Arabic.

Time

Question words

Sample phrases

Grammar

Maltese grammar is fundamentally derived from Arabic, although Latin and English noun pluralisation patterns are also used on borrowed words.

Adjectives and adverbs

Adjectives follow nouns. There are no separately formed native adverbs, and word order is fairly flexible. Both nouns and adjectives of Semitic origin take the definite article (for example, It-tifel il-kbir, lit. "The boy the elder"="The elder boy"). This rule does not apply to adjectives of Romance origin.

Nouns

Nouns are pluralised and also have a dual marker. Semitic plurals are complex; if they are regular (sħaħ), they are marked by -iet/-ijiet, e.g., art, artijiet "lands (territorial possessions or property)" (cf. Arabic -at and Hebrew -ot/-oth) or -in (cf. Arabic -īn and Hebrew -im). If irregular, they fall in the 'plural miksur' (broken plural) category, in which a word is pluralised by internal vowel changes: ktieb, kotba" book", "books"; raġel, irġiel "man", "men". Some nouns can also take both kinds of plurals, like bieb (door) = bwieb, bibien, triq (road) = toroq, triqat, and tazza (cup) = tazzez, tazzi

Words of Romance origin are usually pluralised in two manners: addition of -i or -jiet . For example, lingwa, lingwi "languages", from Sicilian lingua, lingui.

Words of English origin are pluralised by adding either an "-s" or "-jiet", for example, friġġ, friġis from the word fridge. Some words can be pluralised with either of the suffixes to denote the plural. A few words borrowed from English can amalgamate both suffixes, like brikksa from the English brick, which can adopt either collective form brikks or the plural form brikksiet. Interestingly, some nouns of English origins still take Semitic plurals, like senter (gun) coming from 'centre', takes the plural snieter, like in ħanut (shop) = ħwienet, although it is no longer done with new loanwords.

Derivation

As in Arabic, nouns are often derived by changing, adding or removing the vowels within a triliteral root. These are some of the patterns used for nouns:

CaCiC – xadin (monkey), sadid (rust)
CCiC – żbib (raisin), ġbid (pulling)
CaCCa – baqra (cow), basla (onion)
CeCCa – werqa (leaf), xewqa (wish)
CoCCa – borka (wild duck), forka (gallows)
CaCC – qalb (heart), sajd (fishing)
CeCC – kelb (dog), xemx (sun)
CCuCija – tfulija (childhood), xbubija (maidenhood)
CCuCa – rtuba (softness), bjuda (whiteness)
CaCCaC – tallab (beggar), bajjad (whitewasher)

The so-called mimated nouns (nomi mimmati) use the prefix m- in addition to vowel changes. This pattern can be used to indicate place names, tools, abstractions, etc. These are some of the patterns used for mimated nouns:

ma-CCeC – marden (spindle)
mi-CCeC – minkeb (elbow), miżwed (pod)
mu-CCaC – musmar (nail), munqar (beak)

Article

The proclitic il- is the definite article, equivalent to "the" in English and "al-" in Arabic.

The Maltese article becomes l- before or after a vowel.

l-omm (the mother)
rajna l-Papa (we saw the Pope)
il-missier (the father)

The Maltese article assimilates to a following non-ġ coronal consonant (called konsonanti xemxin "sun consonants"), namely:

Ċ iċ-ċikkulata (the chocolate)
D id-dar (the house)
N in-nar (the fire)
R ir-razzett (the farm)
S is-serrieq (the saw)
T it-tifel (the child)
X ix-xemx (the sun)
Ż iż-żarbuna (the shoe)
Z iz-zalzett (the sausage)

Verbs

Verbs show the Semitic triliteral pattern, in which a verb is conjugated with prefixes, suffixes, and infixes (for example ktibna, Arabic katabna, Hebrew kathabhnu (Modern Hebrew: katavnu) "we wrote"). An example is the Semitic root X-M-X ('sun'), for example xemx (sun), xmux (suns), xemxi (sunny), xemxata (sunstroke), nixxemmex (I sunbathe), ma xxemmixtx (I didn't sunbathe), tixmix (the act of sunbathing).

Maltese also features the agglutination of verb suffixes indicating direction of action, for example agħmilhomli "make them for me"← agħmel "make" in the imperative + hom from huma "them" + li suffix indicating first person singular and ħaslitielu "she washed it for him"←ħaslet "she washed" from the verb ħasel "to wash" + ie the object + lu suffix indicating third person masculine singular.

The two tenses are present and perfect. The Maltese verb system incorporates Romance verbs and adds Maltese suffixes and prefixes to them, for example; iddeċidejna "we decided" ← (i)ddeċieda "decide", a Romance verb + -ejna, a Maltese first person plural perfect marker. There is no infinitive in Maltese, yet something similar called the mamma is used, where the 3rd person male perfect singular is considered the root where the consonants are used to form the root (l-għerq), and the verb form found in dictionaries.

In order to make a future sentence, we use the present tense with the addition of ħa or sejjer (conjugated, abbreviated to se or ser for simplicity). Ex. Għada ħa mmur naħsel il-ħwejjeġ (tomorrow I'll go wash my clothes).

Media

As Malta is a multilingual country, the use of Maltese in the mass media is shared with other European languages, namely English and Italian. The majority of television stations broadcast from Malta in English or Maltese, although broadcasts from Italy in Italian are also received on the islands. Similarly, there are more Maltese-language radio programs than English ones broadcast from Malta, but again, Italian broadcasts are also picked up. Coverage in newspaper periodicals is generally equally split between Maltese and English.

Maltese is little used on the internet and few websites are written in the language. In a survey of Maltese cultural websites conducted in 2004 on behalf of the Maltese government, 12 of 13 were in English only and the remaining one was multilingual but did not include Maltese. In 2011, only 6.5 per cent of Maltese internet users reported employing Maltese online, which may be a consequence of the lack of online support for the language.

Code-switching

The Maltese population, being fluent in both Maltese and English, displays code-switching (referred to as Maltenglish) in certain localities and between certain social groups.