A survey of Maltese nicknames I : the nicknames of Naxxar, 1832

Abstract

Nicknaming practices have increasingly become the focus of attention of psychologists and anthropologists, of social historians and linguists. The former see in them an incisive tool for analyzing the psychology of a community; for the latter they represent, very often, both the earliest documentation as well as uninterrupted evidence of development of important aspects of history and of language. In the particular case of the Mediterranean littoral it turns out that nicknaming systems constitute one of the common features of otherwise widely divergent cultural tendencies. The author in this article is aiming to talk about Maltese nicknames, focusing especially on the language and history.