Maltese and Other Languages

by Joseph M. Brincat, 2021

Until relatively recently, the study of language in Malta – and not in Malta alone – had been bedevilled by a myriad traps, deceptions and snares – mostly contrived by amateurs who do not know their place, advertising irrepressible incompetence, fanatical politicians with self-serving agendas and genuine patriots who did not mind being approximately wrong.

Up to not very long ago the precise science of linguistics also served as the banquet table where the uninformed and the inexcusably audacious gorged themselves.

That started changing after World War II, with the pioneer studies of Guzè Aquilina, Pietru Pawl Saydon, Arnold Cassola, Dionysius Agius, Manwel Mifsud, Oliver Friggieri and other stalwarts who laboured to put the study of the Maltese language on a firmer footing. Right up to Joseph Brincat, who in the 2000s published his first versions of the book under review. Finally, with him, the Maltese language has its Bible.

It would be too disheartening to review the ‘pioneers’ of Maltese language so-called studies – all tainted by wholly irrational political bias. Starting with Annibale Preca, on one side, and with Antonio Cini on the other; the Preca cohort is more all over the place with their obsession that Maltese was the proud first-born of Phoenician-Carthaginian.

In 1904, the self-appointed language ‘expert’ Preca could assert with a straight face that undeniably Italian surnames like Anastasi, Aquilina, Diacono and La Rosa, were actually the Punic family names Għajn Istas, Għajn Kollija, Id-Daqni and L-Għarusa.

The opposing Cini faction may not have been cutting-edge science either, but at least was not as wrong at the top of its voice as their ‘Semitic’ adversaries.

Brincat does not list in his exhaustive bibliography my father’s input, his 1938 booklet Mito della Razza, published under the pen-name Promachos at a time when it was hazardous to be even deemed on the wayward side of British colonialism, which manically promoted any ‘Phoenician’ connection.

You know, the Phoenicians colonised Malta and they also visited Cornwall – so British and Maltese are one and the same happy family, ‘stoopid’. I’m not kidding, I’ve read this irrefutable argument bandied about in the 1930s press, even reflected in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I approach this book review with extreme apprehension. I am anything but an expert in linguistic studies, which I only allow myself to reverence from a distance.

Brincat sifts through every titbit of evidence in his attempts to establish what language the inhabitants of the Maltese islands spoke in the megalithic, Punic, Roman and Byzantine eras. He examines this data under an electron microscope in a chapter 33 dense pages long, a tour de force of erudition and sleuthing.

None of the vague pointers result sufficiently eloquent or determining, as what survives proves scarce and contaminated. The final judgement is disconsolate but frank – we just don’t know as yet. And, I guarantee, not through lack of trying on Brincat’s part.

Let me dispel from the outset any preconception that this is a daunting book. On the contrary, I found it a compellingly readable, well documented non-acerbic narrative of what the Maltese language is today and, mostly, how it got there – from the nebulous contours of what the inhabitants of Malta may have spoken in pre-Arabic days, to what the Maltese speak today – Maltese in its various social, cultural and regional variants: Maltese, English, Maltese-English, Italian, Maltese-Italian.

Brincat lays out the scene in his endearing, doting preface, summoning as witnesses his maternal and paternal progeni­tors together with his precious next of kin, and observing with the kindliest of smiles how each of them fits in his or her different, but equally ‘Maltese’, niche.

The book swarms with small or momentous discoveries. The most ground-breaking, in my view, is that present-day Maltese undoubtedly originated from North African Arabic, yet the inhabitants of Malta did not get their language directly from the Maghreb Arabs, but from Sici­lians. Sicily was, up to the

Norman conquest, a thriving colony under Arab rule. Wherever Maltese varies from ‘classical’ Arabic, it varies the way Sicilian-Arabic did, not the way modern Maghreb Arabic does.

This, coupled with other evidence – literary and archaeological – that during extended periods of the Arab rule, the Maltese islands were wholly uninhabited or barely inhabi­ted, confirms the fact that after the Norman re-Christiani­sation of Sicily, Malta welcomed a mass migration of Arabised Sicilians (not Arabs), who brought with them their basically Arabic language, but the Sicilian variant of it.

Finally, with Brincat, the Maltese language has its Bible

Strong, I would say irrefutable, evidence of this still subsists in the language to this very day, silently embedded in the morphology and vocabulary of Maltese. Brincat hints very briefly at DNA sources, which seem to suggest that the genetic profile of the present Maltese population is extravagantly Sicilian, and minimally Arabic. I don’t want to fluster any hornets’ nests, let alone the nastier ones of the racist type.

The original Siculo-Arabic that the new settlers brought over with them from Sicily did not survive forever pure. A stealthy contamination with Romance languages started quite early on, many factors contributing to the present-day extraordinary melange – a language whose grammar remains solidly Semitic but whose vocabulary is mostly non-Arabic.

There are many reasons for this: the Christian, Romance-speaking Sicilians, top-dogs since the Norman takeover, also started settling in Malta, the language of administration became Sicilianised Latin and correspondence with the regal Sicilian bureaucrats had necessarily to be carried out in Chancery Sicilian, Maltese commerce with Italy predominated, and the re-flourishing Christian religion relied exclusively on Latin and Romance idioms.

In Malta, Arabic-Maltese found itself besieged on all sides by Romance forces. It surrendered part of its dictionary but held fast to its organic Semitic structure. Brincat has discovered fingerprints of this evolutionary process scattered all over the corpus of words used, or formerly used, in Malta.

The Order of St John, which ruled the islands for over a quarter of a millennium, gene­rally showed indifference to the language of its subjects. Although the three numerically major Langues in which the knights subdivided all spoke French, for official usages the knights resorted to Latin and later Italian. With eight different Langues, together with many foreign traders, visitors and with slaves from Turkey, Russia and North Africa, tiny Malta had turned into a veritable Babel of discordant languages.

A few knights, and others, mostly Grand Tour scholars, during the Order’s rule proved inquisitive enough to show an interest in the strange uncouth ‘Moorish’ speech heard from the natives and tried to penetrate some of its arcane secrets. How could it have origi­nated? Was it worth studying?

The very first ‘scholars’, faltering and unsound, but still the pioneers of Maltese studies, happened to be all foreigners. The domestic linguists only started showing some interest in their own language in the 18th century, But they eventually took over, and with a vengeance, making up handsomely for their earlier sloth.

Prof. Brincat has, probably laudably, omitted from his bibliography my one, timid and eminently expendable venture in Maltese linguistics, my 2007 paper on the Order’s legacy to the Maltese language. So, with what misplaced bravado do I now venture to assess critically this book which must surely count as today’s Holy Grail of Maltese linguistics?

For almost a hundred years during the British period, the so-called “language question” plagued the island. London came to believe that the security and welfare of the Empire required a more complete anglicisation of Malta. For centuries the current written language in the island had been Italian.

The administration, the Church, the literati and intelligentsia, the tribunals, the university all took it for granted, effortlessly and without a trace of official imposition, that the inhabitants spoke Maltese but wrote Italian.

To the British colonialists and their home-brewed minions, this cultural italianità galled, just as the suppression of Italian by government dictat outraged the non-colonialists. Why should our owners inflict English by legislation as the current and dominant language?

The population matter-of-factly, split: those who resented foreign interference in their millennial cultural heritage, and those who would do anything they believed would gratify our colonial owners.

Whole volumes have been written about this most central and disruptive bone of contention in Maltese politics up to World War II. Brincat has a fresh take on it – how the Anglo-Italian political tensions in Malta and the formation of political parties helped push the Maltese language to the forefront.

And how this, in turn, whetted an ever more scientific inquisitiveness in, and study of, Maltese linguistics – this all took place during the British period.

So, what is the present and the future of our proud language? The influx of non-Maltese words, though statistically not as massive as perceived, has helped to keep the Maltese language vital and vibrant. Enriched? Or bastardised? It does not really matter, so long as the language is not on the list of endangered species.