Tunisian student Jamil Bou Said told Sky News Arabia: “If you visit Malta, don’t worry, you will feel like you are in an Arab country, and if you need material transactions, the numbers are pronounced in Maltese as if they were in Arabic. completely.”
He explained: “They speak Arabic with the dialect of the Maghreb people, but they are not Arabs.”
Malta
Malta is a small island country that joined the European Union in 2004 and became a member of the Schengen area in 2007. Located in the Mediterranean Sea just 80 km south of Italy, Malta is one of the the smallest and most densely populated in the world. . It is considered one of the richest places in Europe culturally, historically and linguistically. It belongs to the European Union and Schengen countries, and most of its inhabitants speak Arabic. The presence of the Arabic language in it is a natural historical product.
According to Martin Zamit, a professor of Arabic at the University of Malta who translated the Holy Quran into the Maltese language, he confirms that “the relationship between the Maltese and Arabic languages reaches the degree of conformity with the rules of grammar, morphology and other rules of the language.
According to Zamit, “Many of the Maltese Christian religious words that are used in the liturgy are Islamic Arabic words, whereas we don’t find that among Middle Eastern Christians, for example.”
History of the Maltese language
And the researcher continues: “Malta is a European country with its own independent language, but more than half of its population speaks Arabic with the dialect of the Maghreb countries.”
How?
Research confirms that “the convergence of the islands that make up Malta played an important role for many decades in the transmission of the language between them during the succession of powers controlling the Mediterranean”.
She explains that, “as a result of the interaction between the emerging countries of Europe and the ancient Arab cultures of Africa and the Middle East, Maltese society was shaped by centuries of foreign domination by various powers such as than the Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks and Arabs.”
A language bearing Maghrebian heritage
Moroccan writer and media personality Abd al-Rahim al-Turani said in an exclusive interview with Sky News Arabia that many Arabs are unaware that the people of Malta speak a language close to the colloquial Maghrebi dialect, which some scholars describe as ” a language that bears the Maghrebian heritage.”
Al-Turani continues: “More than 80% of the words and expressions included in the Maltese language and rooted in the Arabic colloquial lexicon in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have been counted. Not to mention that there are many names of cities and of villages in Malta which are Arabic names.
And he adds: “Tracing back in history, we find that Muslims entered Malta at the end of the 9th century AD, and remained there for about two centuries.”
And he continues: “Despite Malta’s historical estrangement from Arabs and Muslims, and the introduction of European languages to this Mediterranean island, until the English language became the official language of Malta, the Maghrebi Arabic dialect was remained the language of communication and communication between Maltese and the mother tongue acquired instinctively outside of school curricula.” in schools.
Al-Turani concludes his speech to Sky News Arabia, “Historians say that the Maltese are of Arab origin, remnants of the Arabs who lived on the island since the end of the 9th century AD, and the proof of this is their daily life language, which is rooted in the colloquial dialect of the Maghreb, which is spoken in the Tunisian dialect.” .
The official language of Malta is Maltese, with English as the second language in the country.
Origins of the language
The Maltese language is one of the only Semitic languages in the European Union written in Latin letters. Maltese is derived from the ancient, extinct Sicilian Arabic language that had spread during the Islamic rule of the islands of Malta and Sicily, which lasted over 350 years.
current clarity
Arabic vocabulary makes up about 70% of the Maltese language, which is a mixture of Arabic, Italian, French and Spanish. I was influenced by the dialects of the Levant and the Arab Maghreb because of the commercial and touristic factor, and it sounds more like the Tunisian dialect than any other dialect.
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