Maltese is the national language of Malta, and an official language of the European Union. It is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet in its standard form.
Apart from its phonology, Maltese bears considerable similarity to urban varieties of Tunisian Arabic and other North African Arabic dialects. Others however claim that there is a higher similarity to certain Lebanese and Syrian dialects, reflecting a common Phoenician/Carthaginian origin, which predates Arabic, with which it shares its Akkadian origins.[citation needed] In the course of history, the language has adopted numerous loanwords, phonetic and phonological features, and even morphological and syntactic patterns from Sicilian, Italian, and English.
Maltese became an official language of Malta in 1936, alongside English. Today, there are an estimated 371,900 Maltese speakers, mostly residing in Malta, although a number of Maltese expatriates in Australia, the United States, Canada and Gibraltar can still speak the language. In 2007 it was reported that Maltese is still spoken by Maltese descendants in Tunisia.[1]
The oldest known document in Maltese is "Il Cantilena," a poem from the 15th century written by Pietro Caxaro. For centuries, Maltese was nearly exclusively a spoken language, with writing being done in Arabic, or later, Italian.
Semitic grammatical structure
Adjectives follow nouns, there are no separately formed native adverbs, and word order is fairly flexible. As in Arabic and Hebrew, 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"; cf. Arabic at-tifl-u l-kabi:r, Hebrew ha-na`ar ha-gadol). This rule does not apply to adjectives of Romance origin.
Nouns are pluralized and also have a dual marker (rare among modern European languages, others including Slovene and Sorbian).
Semitic plurals are complex; if they are regular, they are marked by -iet/-ijiet, e.g., art, artijiet "lands (territorial possessions or property)" (cf. Arabic -at and Hebrew -ot) or -in (cf. Arabic -in and Hebrew -im). If irregular, they fall in the pluralis fractus category, in which a word is pluralized by internal vowel changes: ktieb, kotba "books", ragel, irgiel "men". This is very well-developed in Arabic.
Verbs still show a triliteral Semitic pattern, in which a verb is conjugated with prefixes, suffixes, and infixes (for example ktibna, Arabic katabna, Hebrew katavnu "we wrote"). There are two tenses: present and perfect.