Maltese is an Arabic-born language written only in the Latin alphabet
Maltese grew from the Arabic spoken in medieval Sicily, yet it has never been written in Arabic script. It is the European Union's only official Semitic language, and a Maltese speaker can say answer two ways, one Arabic and one Italian, much as English has answer and response.
Early Maltese scholars guessed the language descended from ancient Punic, and later ones blamed a North African Arabic brought by the Aghlabid conquest of the ninth century. Genetic and historical work instead shows Malta was left largely empty after that raid and resettled early in the eleventh century by Sicilians and Calabrians speaking Siculo-Arabic. Fascist Italy, implausibly, labelled it a regional form of Italian.
What made it a language of its own was isolation. The Norman conquest of 1091 and the expulsion of Muslims, finished by 1249, cut the islands off from the Arab world. In Sicily the parent tongue died out and gave way to Sicilian, but in Malta it kept developing beside Italian. A will from 1436 contains the first written mention, calling it lingua maltensi, and the oldest surviving text is Il-Kantilena, a fifteenth-century poem by Pietru Caxaro.
The vocabulary reflects that layered history. Roughly a third comes from Arabic, including the basic words and grammatical glue, about half from Italian and Sicilian, and between 6 and 20 percent from English. Understanding is lopsided: a 2016 study found Tunisian and Libyan Arabic speakers follow about 40 percent of everyday Maltese, while Maltese speakers grasp under a third of those dialects. Rural varieties keep more Semitic roots and sit closer to the medieval ancestor than the standard language does.
British rule pushed English and eroded Maltese use, but it became an official language in 1934, a decade after the modern spelling system arrived in 1924, and reforms after independence revived it. Ethnologue counts about 530,000 speakers, 450,000 of them in Malta. The biggest community abroad, in Australia, fell from 45,000 in 1996 to 36,000 in 2006, and a Tunisian community that once numbered thousands had shrunk to 100 to 200 people by 2017.
Source: Maltese language
