Is Maltese Arabic?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Maltese is a unique and interesting language because it is a Semitic language with a twist. It is the only Semitic language that is an official language of the European Union. It is spoken by around 520,000 people, mostly on the island nation of Malta, which is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, not far from Sicily and not far from Tunisia and Libya in North Africa. Some people claim that Maltese is a descendant of the ancient Phoenician language. But actually, there's no linguistic evidence for this. Maltese is a descendant of a dialect of Arabic called seculo Arabic or Sicilian Arabic, but it has diverged quite a lot from Arabic over the last thousand years or so and has now become its own language. The syntax and grammar of Maltese remains Arabic and about a third of the vocabulary is still Arabic and that includes most of the grammatical function words as well as a lot of the most basic vocabulary. About half of the vocabulary is from Italian or Sicilian and the remaining vocabulary is mostly from English and French. It's still considered a Semitic language because of its Arabic origin and because of its structure. But if you take into account all of the foreign loan words, especially the romance loan words, then it's essentially a hybrid language. Kind of like a Semitic romance hybrid.