Forgotten letters that formed part of the Maltese alphabet in its earliest written incarnations have been given new digital life in a project celebrating the centenary of the Akkademja tal-Malti. 

In 1920, when the Akkademja was established as the Għaqda tal-Kittieba tal-Malti, one of its first tasks was to formalise an alphabet for a language that had quickly gone from a purely spoken one to one printed in books and taught in schools. 

Before this, with no such formalisation, writers had simply chosen their own alphabets for their work, resulting in an eclectic mix of characters – some drawn from other writing systems and some entirely unique – most of which quickly faded from use. 

"For some, this endless variation represented only a headache for schoolchildren. For us today, the different alphabets are not only a marker by which to identify their writers, but a testament to the creativity of writers seeking to preserve the Maltese identity while keeping the language as simple as possible," the Akkademja said. 

But the loss of these letters with the introduction of the standardised alphabet has meant difficulties for students and researchers digitally transcribing old Maltese texts today, who have had no way of representing the variation of the time and have often had to resort to using only the modern alphabet. 

The new project, the culmination of a two-year research process, presents all the letters of the time in digital form to be downloaded and installed for free by anyone. 

In all, 126 lower-case and 112 upper-case characters were identified and digitised. The difference comes from some letters, particularly those derived from Arabic, which have no upper-case form. 

More information, together with the letter-sets for download, is available on the Akkademja tal-Malti website.