Hajjin, hajjin! Maltese

"Alive, alive!" Maltese fishmongers cry. It's as much a commentary on their ancient, yet eternally young, language as it is on their wares. Today the Maltese are shaping their language, which has played a vernacular role for two millennia, into a fully-enfranchised national tongue.

Playing in traffic

As one of the most strategic crossroads in the Mediterranean, the island nation of Malta has seen more than its share of history. Little is known about its original inhabitants, who in any case appear not to have survived the arrival of the Phonecians. A Punic (Phonecian, later Carthaginian) dialect is therefore counted the ancestor of modern Maltese. Strangely, few Punic artifacts remain either in modern Maltese or in Malta's place names, although Punic inscriptions are sprinkled throughout its archaeological sites.

Malta was next forcibly annexed by Rome in 248 BCE, and Latin established as its official language. So began 2000 years of Semitic-European linguistic cohabitation that has alternately nudged Maltese first in one direction, then in the other. In 870 CE, Malta was absorbed into the Muslim empire, and Arabic (like Punic, a Semitic tradition) installed. Two centuries later, the Normans wrested the islands from the caliphs and reimposed Latin, while their own proto-Romance language served as the social medium of the aristocracy. Nevertheless, the locals continued to speak their Arabic dialect. Over the next thousand years, Latin and Norman would cede to Sicilian and mainland Italian, each striking deep into the Arabic tradition until Maltese could no longer properly be called either. Modern Maltese expressions such as grazzi hafna ("Thanks a lot") mirror its unique place in the linguistic continuum.

The twain meet

To convey some inkling of the difficulty that crossing Semitic with Indo-European languages presents, note that Arabic roots are not based on syllables, as in Indo-European languages (Christ > Christian > Christianity), but on consonant progressions (s-l-m > Muslim > Islam). No small feat, blending such disparate languages into one.

Maltese recalls Swahili (an Arabic-Bantu hybrid) in its complexity, with the exception that whereas Swahili draws its basic framework from just one of its ancestors, Maltese grammar actually incorporates fundamentally different structural features from both. For example, it has two entirely different verb schemes: one for Semitic-derived verbs, another for verbs drawn from European languages. In this sense, Maltese speakers resemble bilinguals, in the psycholinguistic sense. Like speakers of two distinct languages, maltophones must assimilate two entirely different frames of association.