Paper
Languages and Varieties in Use in Malta Today: Maltese, English, Italian, Maltese English and Maltaliano
Published Dec 2, 2017 · Joseph M. Brincat
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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 Mediterraneap ,speak a dialect or a local variety of the language spoken in the nearest large natio~ state: in Majorca and Minorca they speak Spanish, in Corsica some speak the patois but 111ost speak only French, their official language, in Pantelleria they speak Sicilian an4, wrtte Italian, in Jerba they speak Arabic, in Crete Greek and in Cyprus Greek 01: 'f{irkish. 1 /The 400,000 inhabitants of Malta and Gozo, living in an area of just 316 sq km, nowadays use 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 stro1-i,g"'$a 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 iii Latin and/ or chancery Sicilian, while M~1tese continued to be spoken. 1 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. 2 ) During the time of the Order of St ]Ghn, Malta vvas multilingual, thanks to the pre'sence 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 documentsf 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. English \Vas introduced to the island only in 1800, when Napoleon was ousted and his plans for a Frenchified Malta were shelved, but it did not spread quickly. In fact anglicization was strongly resisted by the local inhabitants, who stuck to their Roman Catholic religion, their Italian culture and legal system, and their Semitic tong~The British felt uncomfortable governing an island in Italian. All official communications
Maltese, English, and Italian are the main languages used in Malta, with Maltese English and Maltaliano being the official languages.
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