Throughout the ages, the Maltese language has undergone a series of internal changes as well as modifications and accretions caused by various external forces. Internal changes are not easy to date and explain because they require a painstaking comparative exercise that can be carried out only by experts in Semitic languages. As a result, their systematic description in a historical grammar of Maltese has not yet been published. By contrast, the external history of Maltese is essentially an account of its contact with various languages. All languages are marked by contact, albeit to varying degrees. Gumperz holds that "most words in most modern languages would count as borrowed" (1982: 67), but what makes Maltese unique is that it blends together elements from three distinct language families: the Semitic, the Romance, and the Germanic. The language spoken in Malta today is the result of a process that has been going on for a thousand years and, consequently, the account presented in this book will show how social, political, and cultural events are reflected in the changing face of the language. As the lexicon is the most tangible aspect of a language, it will naturally be privileged in this account. Thanks to its position exactly at the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, 90 km from Sicily and 290 km from the Tunisian coast, Malta's relations have not been limited to its immediate neighbours, Sicily and North Africa. Since time immemorial, Malta has been at the mercy of all the great naval powers that sailed the Sicilian channel. As a result, the Maltese language has been shaped by its inhabitants' interactions with all the peoples who, throughout the centuries, have landed on the islands to govern it or establish colonies there. In a territory as small as 27 km by 14 km, the ratio between the numbers of the rulers and the ruled is highly significant. For thousands of years, when the inhabitants had to live off the islands' resources, the size of the population must have been consistently small, around 5,000 in all; this factor may have allowed the language to be substituted a number of times. This may surprise us today, but before the Romantic Age, people had a very pragmatic view of language. Like any other tool, language was prized mostly for its efficiency. The population of the Maltese islands has multiplied in the past one thousand years, rising to around 400,000, and such a rapid increase in such a small place could not fail to exert a strong influence on the linguistic scenario. The increase in population was due not only to natural growth but also to cumulative waves of settlers from abroad. Social interaction between the locals and the visitors was strong, bilingual communication took place in various domains at all social levels and relations were especially strong when mixed marriages took place. For this reason, a history of the Maltese language must be seen in the wider context of a linguistic history of the Maltese islands, and will offer linguists belonging to both the historical and typological fields an intriguing case study of what can be considered a "minor" language from the international point of view (used only in a small state, but spoken by the great majority of the islanders) which has managed to survive alongside a series of "major" languages such as Arabic, Latin, Sicilian, Italian, and English, languages which were widely spoken and written abroad and which also enjoyed prestige in Malta itself, but whose local circulation was generally limited to the literate minority.

The purpose of this volume is to present a snapshot of the state of the art of research on the languages of the Maltese islands, which include spoken Maltese, Maltese English and Maltese Sign Language. Malta is a tiny, but densely populated country, with over 422,000 inhabitants spread over only 316 square kilometers. It is a bilingual country, with Maltese and English enjoying the status of official languages. Maltese is a descendant of Arabic, but due to the history of the island, it has borrowed extensively from Sicilian, Italian and English. Furthermore, local dialects still coexist alongside the official standard language. The status of English as a second language dates back to British colonial rule, and just as in other former British colonies, a characteristic Maltese variety of English has developed. To these languages must be added Maltese Sign Language, which is the language of the Maltese Deaf community. This was recently recognised as Malta’s third official language by an act of Parliament in 2016. While a volume such as the present one can hardly do justice to all aspects of a diverse and complex linguistic situation, even in a small community like that of Malta, our aim in editing this book was to shed light on the main strands of research being undertaken in the Maltese linguistic context. Six of the contributions in this book focus on Maltese and explore a broad range of topics including: historical changes in the Maltese sound system; syllabification strategies; the interaction of prosody and gesture; the constraints regulating /t/-insertion; the productivity of derivational suffixes; and raising phenomena. The study of Maltese English, especially with the purpose of establishing the defining characteristics of this variety of English, is a relatively new area of research. Three of the papers in this volume deal with Maltese English, which is explored from the different perspectives of rhythm, the syntax of nominal phrases, and lexical choice. The last contribution discusses the way in which Maltese Sign Language (LSM) has evolved alongside developments in LSM research. In summary, we believe the present volume has the potential to present a unique snapshot of a complex linguistic situation in a geographically restricted area. Given the nature and range of topics proposed, the volume will likely be of interest to researchers in both theoretical and comparative linguistics, as well as those working with experimental and corpus-based methodologies. Our hope is that the studies presented here will also serve to pave the way for further research on the languages of Malta, encouraging researchers to also take new directions, including the exploration of variation and sociolinguistic factors which, while often raised as explanatory constructs in the papers presented here, remain under-researched.

This third edition of Kenneth Katzner's best-selling guide to languages is essential reading for language enthusiasts everywhere. Written with the non-specialist in mind, its user-friendly style and layout, delightful original passages, and exotic scripts, will continue to fascinate the reader. This new edition has been thoroughly revised to include more languages, more countries, and up-to-date data on populations. Features include: *information on nearly 600 languages *individual descriptions of 200 languages, with sample passages and English translations *concise notes on where each language is spoken, its history, alphabet and pronunciation *coverage of every country in the world, its main language and speaker numbers *an introduction to language families

Is grammatical gender merely stored as a syntactic property of nouns, or is it computed according to a noun’s semantic, morphological and phonological properties every time it is required? In many languages, gender appears to resist systematic treatment and can even cause problems for non-native learners. Native speakers of these languages appear to have no difficulty in assigning the correct grammatical gender to thousands of nouns in their language. Being an offshoot of Arabic, Maltese inherited a system comprising two gender categories, masculine and feminine. Numerous nouns were introduced in Maltese through contact with Sicilian and subsequently with Italian, two languages that also have a masculine/feminine-based gender system. However, the more recent contact, with English, seems to have complicated matters. This work investigates how grammatical gender functions in Maltese, how native speakers apply different criteria to classify nouns, and how this choice is reflected in syntactic agreement. It also takes into consideration the wider psycholinguistic context that influences the choice of category, and provides valuable data for theories that seek to explain the linguistic categorization of nouns in various languages.

The contributions included in this collection present different perspectives on various aspects of Maltese Linguistics, thereby enriching a field which has been attracting considerably greater interest in recent years than was the case in the past. The papers focus on the Maltese language itself as well as on Maltese in relation to other languages. They provide a picture of Maltese mainly from a synchronic perspective, descriptions ranging from indepth analyses of morphological and syntactic features to contributions on the lexicon, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics. A number of papers dealing with diachronic considerations are also included. The topics dealt with in this volume show not only that Maltese is the object of research from a variety of perspectives but also that scholars with diverse backgrounds and of different nationalities are studying this language, thus providing an enriching body of knowl-edge, including findings of interest to general linguistics and various other fields in the humanities. Der vorliegende Band enthält Beiträge mit vielfältigen Herangehensweisen zu unterschiedlichen Aspekten der maltesischen Sprachwissenschaft und erweitert dadurch den Blick auf eine Disziplin, die in den letzten Jahren deutlich mehr Interesse findet als das in der Vergangenheit der Fall war. Der Fokus wird in den einzelnen Beiträgen sowohl auf die maltesische Sprache an sich als auch auf den Sprachkontakt von Maltesisch mit anderen Sprachen gerichtet. Neben synchronen Untersuchungen, die morphologische und syntaktische Eigenschaften sowie lexikalische, korpus- und soziolinguistische Aspekte von Maltesisch eingehend beleuchten, finden sich Analysen mit vorwiegend diachroner Blickrichtung. Die thematische Vielfalt des vorliegenden Bandes, die aus den unterschiedlichen He-rangehensweisen der beteiligten Wissenschaftler unterschiedlicher Nationalität und mit unterschiedlichem Forschungshintergrund resultiert, erweitert nicht nur den Wissensbestand der maltesischen Linguistik, sondern kann auch bereichernde Erkenntnisse für die Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft sowie für andere Zweige der Geisteswissenschaften liefern.

This book documents the lesser-known varieties of English which have been overlooked and understudied within the canon of English linguistics.