Maltese language family

It is spoken by the Maltese people and is the national language of Malta , [ 3 ] and the only official Semitic and Afroasiatic language of the European Union. According to John L. Maltese is also distinguished from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages , namely Italian and Sicilian.

Maltese has always been written in the Latin script , the earliest surviving example dating from the late Middle Ages. 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 , followed by the expulsion of the Muslims , complete by , permanently isolated the vernacular from its Arabic source, creating the conditions for its evolution into a distinct language. The earliest known Maltese dictionary was a 16th-century manuscript entitled "Maltese-Italiano"; it was included in the Biblioteca Maltese of Mifsud in , but is now lost.

An early manuscript dictionary, Dizionario Italiano e Maltese , was discovered in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome in the s, together with a grammar, the Regole per la Lingua Maltese , attributed to a French knight named Thezan.

Semitic languages

Ethnologue reports a total of , Maltese speakers: , in Malta and 79, in the diaspora. Most speakers also use English, [ 1 ] usually the local dialect known as Maltese English. The largest diaspora community of Maltese speakers is in Australia , with 36, speakers reported in down from 45, in , 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 to people as of Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family. Today, the core vocabulary including both the most commonly used vocabulary and function words is Semitic, with a large number of loanwords. Maltese has historically been classified in various ways, with some claiming that it was derived from ancient Punic another Semitic language instead of Siculo-Arabic, [ 22 ] [ 29 ] [ 30 ] and others claiming it is one of the Berber languages another language family within Afroasiatic.

Urban varieties of Maltese are closer to Standard Maltese than rural varieties, [ 32 ] which have some characteristics that distinguish them from Standard Maltese.