Language and demography in Malta : the social foundations of the symbiosis between Semitic and Romance in standard Maltese

Abstract

The History of the language spoken in Malta is essentially concerned with the convergence, of two unrelated linguistic families, Southern European Romance and North African Semitic. The meeting point, should have been, perhaps was for a short time, Sicily where the same political and social circumstances existed. Geographically Sicily is nearer both to the Italian mainland and- the Tunisian coast but Malta’s isolation, geographic and administrative, allowed the natural process of symbiosis to go on unhindered, while in Sicily re-Latinization took place rapidly, following a deliberate demographic and linguistic policy.