Languages and varieties in use in Malta today : Maltese, English, Italian, Maltese English and Maltaliano

Abstract

Persons who have never visited Malta usually fail to realize that Maltese 'works' as a normal language. This is because most islands in the Mediterranean, speak a dialect or a local variety of the language spoken in the nearest large nation state: in Majorca and Minorca they speak Spanish, in Corsica some speak the patois but most speak only French, their official language, in Pantelleria they speak Sicilian and, write Italian, in Jerba they speak Arabic, in Crete Greek and in Cyprus Greek or Turkish. The 400,000 inhabitants of Malta and Gozo, living in an area of just 316 sq km, nowadays se Maltese, English and Italian regularly, and their exposure to these three languages unavoidably determines a degree of intermingling. Because of its situation at the centre of the Mediterranean, Malta is not only exposed to the four winds and to strong sea currents, it is also swept by the prevailing cultural trends, today as in the past. The use of three languages in Malta is attested as far back as the early Roman period (from 218 to the first century BC), by inscriptions in Punic, Greek and Latin, and again during the post-Norman period, when documents were written in Latin and/ or chancery Sicilian, while Maltese continued to be spoken. This is the only variety of Maghreb Arabic that survived from the Muslim expansion into Spain and Sicily, where it died out in the fifteenth and the thirteenth centuries respectively, while Pantelleria kept it at least up to the seventeenth century. During the time of the Order of St John, Malta was multilingual, thanks to the presence of hundreds of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and English knights, sailors, soldiers and servants. The local population, however, used only Latin, Italian (which replaced Sicilian in local documents and Maltese, which was also studied and written, with the result that grammars, dictionaries, poems and sermons were produced in manuscripts as well as in print.