Advanced English Skills

Language Log
Maltese Arabic: Correction?

In Victor's recent post "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6", he wrote that "I do not include Maltese because of the Romance superstrata". A more elaborate version of this idea can be found in the Wikipedia article, which tells us that

Maltese […] is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata spoken by the Maltese people. […] Maltese is a Latinized variety of spoken historical Arabic through its descent from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of latinization. It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage.

Both Victor and Wikipedia are somewhat wrong, or at least misleading — and my main evidence for this is an amusing anecdote. So onwards…
The 2010 LREC conference was held in Valetta, Malta. One of the other attendees was my colleague Mohamed Maamouri, a native speaker of Tunisian Arabic who has extensive research and publications on relevant topics, starting from his 1967 Cornell thesis The Phonology of Tunisian Arabic. His Google Scholar listing also includes "Language education and human development: Arabic diglossia and its impact on the quality of education in the Arab region" (1998), "Dialectal Arabic telephone speech corpus: Principles, tool design, and transcription conventions" (2004), "Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects" (2012), The Georgetown Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (2013) and The Georgetown Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic (2019).

The area around the conference venue in Valetta was oriented toward tourism, and so the personnel in restaurants, coffee shops and similar sites communicated with their customers in English, French, or other European languages. But among themselves they spoke Maltese — and naturally enough, Mohamed often joined their conversations.

Since he was clearly part of the conference crew, the puzzled response was "How do you know Maltese?" His answer (in Tunisian Arabic) was "Oh, I'm actually speaking Tunisian".

And the reaction was total shock. Eyebrows went up, eyes opened wide, bodies jumped back. This was WTF type shock,, not "how wonderful" type shock — the clerks and baristas were clearly upset at the idea that Maltese and Tunisian are not only mutually intelligible, but are sometimes indistinguishable, at least at the level of brief conversational exchanges.

After a couple of such experiences, Mohamed changes his responses, to something like "Oh, my mother is Maltese…" And of course he also looked into the matter at greater length, including discussions with local Maltese linguists. The conclusion (at least as far as I recall, 14 years later): Despite the strong socio-political divergence over the many centuries during which Malta resisted first the Arab conquest of the Maghreb and southern Italy and Spain, and then the Ottoman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, some varieties of Maltese Arabic are apparently quite close to some varieties of Tunisian Arabic.

How can that have happened? Apparently, it's partly because of what happened in the 11th century to get the Maltese language started; but it's also because Malta is actually quite close to Tunisia by sea, and over the centuries, there was a lot of under-the-table cultural and commercial contact. This also apparently includes a certain number of families with branches in both countries. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MaltaTunisiaSicilyMap.png As I said, [...]

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