Main trends in the history of Maltese literature

Abstract

The discovery in 1966 of Pietro Caxaro's Cantilena, a beautiful poem in Mediaeval Maltese presumably composed in the middle of the 15th century, only marks an isolated effort by an eminent man of letters to produce a literary piece in Maltese. The Cantilena stands out as the earliest known work in the language and does not imply in any way the existence of a contemporary literary tradition in the vernacular. When Maltese, an originally Semitic dialect gradually developed into a highly expressive language on its own through direct contacts with non-Arabic sources of influence (mainly Sicilian, Italian, French, and English), started to be written in the 17th century and then on a much wider scale in the 18th and 19th centuries, Italian had already established itself as the only and unquestionable cultural language of the island and had a respectable literary tradition of its own.