Maltese Language - History

History

Malta was occupied by the Fatimids, who exerted 220 years of linguistic influence, from 870 to 1090 CE.

The oldest reference to Maltese comes from the Benedictine monks of Catania, who were unable to open a monastery in Malta, in 1364, because they could not understand the native language. In 1436, in the will of a certain Pawlu Peregrino, Maltese is first identified as lingua maltensi. The oldest known document in Maltese is "Il Cantilena" (Maltese: Xidew il-Qada) a poem from the 15th century written by Pietro Caxaro, and the first known Maltese dictionary was written by the French Knight Francois de Vion Thezan Court in 1640. It includes notes about Maltese grammar and a concluding section detailing, in Italian and Maltese, phrases to be used when giving orders to soldiers. Facsimiles of the work are currently published.

In his book Dell’Istoria della Sacra Religione et Illustrissima Militia di San Giovanni Gierosolimitano (English: The History of the Sacred Religion and Illustrious Militia of St John of Jerusalem), written between 1594 and 1602, Giacomo Bosio endorses the notion that Maltese descended from Carthaginian. Bosio writes that when the cornerstone of Valletta was placed, a group of Maltese elders said "Iegi zimen en fel wardia col sceber raba iesue uquie" (which in modern Maltese reads, "Jiġi żmien li fil-Wardija kull xiber raba’ jiswa uqija," and in English, "There will come a time when every piece of land on Sciberras Hill will be worth its weight in gold"). This is the oldest example of printed Maltese.

Athanasius Kircher spent two years in Malta (1637–38) and made observations running counter to ideas of Punic ancestry accepted by his contemporaries. In his Mundus Subterraneus he says of the Maltese, "they speak the purest form of Arabic, corrupted by neither Italian nor any other language." Other theories include those in Johann Friedrich Breithaupt's Christliche Helden Insel Malta (English: Malta, Home of Christian Heroes), published in 1632, where he calls Maltese a mixed 'barbaric' language and John Dryden's description of the language as 'Berber' on his visit to the islands (the memoirs of those journeys appeared in 1776).

In 1584 Pasquale Vassallo, a Dominican friar, wrote a collection of songs in Italian and Maltese. In 1585 the poems were burned on the orders of the Inquisition, for allegedly 'obscene' content. The German traveler Hieronymus Megiser includes a list of Maltese words in his Thesaurus Polyglottus (published in 1603), and also in his more celebrated work Propugnaculum Europae, published in 1606. Megiser, who visited Malta from 1588 to 1589, proposed a Punic heritage for the language, a suggestion rebuffed in 1660 by Burchardus Niderstedt in his book Malta vetus et nova. In 1677, Domenico and Carlo Magri gave the etymologies for various Maltese words in their book Hierolexicon, a Latin version of the encyclopedia Notitia de vocaboli ecclesiastici first published in 1644.

Maltese became an official language of Malta in 1934, alongside English, when Italian was dropped from official use.