Maltese
Maltin

File:Maltespeople.JPG Gerald Strickland • Enrico Mizzi • Edward de Bono • Rużar Briffa
Regions with significant populations
Malta:    400,000 (2006)  Australia:    153,805 (2006)[1]  United States:    35,540 (2002)[2])  Brazil:    58,000<  Canada:    37,125 (2006)[3])  United Kingdom:    30,178 (Maltese born in 2001[4])  Ireland:    285 (2006)[5]  Gibraltar:    100
Languages
Official languages: Maltese, English[6] Significant historical languages: Italian, Sicilian, Siculo-Arabic, French
Religion
Roman Catholic.

The Maltese people or Maltese are a Southern European nation and ethnic group native to Malta, an island nation consisting of an archipelago of seven islands in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

Historical background

Malta has been inhabited from around 5200 BC, since the arrival of settlers from the island of Sicily.^[7] A significant prehistoric Neolithic culture marked by Megalithic structures existed on the islands, predating the Pyramids of Giza by a millennium. The Phoenicians colonized Malta from about 1000 BC, using the islands as an outpost from which they expanded sea explorations and trade in the Mediterranean until their successors, the Carthaginians, were ousted by the Romans in 216 BC.

After a period of Byzantine rule (4th to 9th century) and a probable sack by the Vandals^{[citation needed]}, the islands were conquered by the Arabs in AD 870. The Arabs, who generally tolerated the population's Christianity^[8], introduced the cultivation of citrus fruits and cotton, and irrigation systems. Arab influence can be seen most prominently in the modern Maltese language, a descendant of Siculo-Arabic, and the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet in its standard form.

From the advent of the Normans in 1090 to 1530, Malta was part of the Kingdom of Sicily; thus from 1091 until 1530, when the Order of St. John came to Malta. The island's population was further enhanced by European elements over the period of 440 years under the rule of the Knights.

The French under Napoleon took hold of the Maltese islands in 1798, although with the aid of the British, the Maltese were able to oust French control two years later. The inhabitants subsequently desired Britain to accept the sovereignty of the islands, and as part of the Treaty of Paris (1814), Malta became a colony within the British Empire.

Malta was granted independence on September 21, 1964 (Independence Day). Under its 1964 constitution, Malta initially retained Queen Elizabeth II as Queen of Malta, with a Governor-General exercising executive authority on her behalf. On December 13, 1974 (Republic Day), however, it became a republic within the Commonwealth, with the President as head of state. Malta joined the European Union on May 1, 2004 and joined the Eurozone on January 1, 2008.

Culture

Language

Maltese people speak the Maltese language, a Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet in its standard form. The language developed from Siculo-Arabic, an Arabic dialect spoken in Sicily and surrounding Southern Italy.^[9] However in the course of Malta's recent history, the language has adopted large amounts of vocabulary from Italian (in particular, Sicilian), English, and lesserly, French. The official languages of Malta are English and Maltese, with Italian also widely spoken.

Maltese became an official language of Malta in 1934, prior to which the official language was Italian. Today, there are an estimated 371,900 Maltese speakers. There are a significant number of Maltese expatriates in Australia, the United States and Canada who can still speak the language.

Multilingualism

Bilingualism and even multilingualism is common in Malta. The Eurobarometer statistics show 100% of people speak Maltese, 88% speak English, 66% Italian, 17% French, which shows a greater degree of fluency in a greater amount of languages than many other European countries have.^[10]

For 29% of the population, English is the language of the workplace. Studies indicate that somewhere between 86% and 90% of the population speak Maltese within their families, while among friends, that figure drops to about 83.6%. For several decades there has been a growing trend among young Maltese families to speak to their children in English at home. Secondary and tertiary education is exclusively in English.^[11]

Religion

The Constitution of Malta provides for freedom of religion but establishes Roman Catholicism as the state religion. Freedom House and the World Factbook report that 98 percent of the Maltese religion is Roman Catholic, making the nation one of the most Catholic countries in the world.

Genetic links

The first settlers of Malta were from the island of Sicily.^[7] However, the result of the influences on the population after this have been fiercely debated among historians and geneticists. The origins question is complicated by numerous factors, including Malta's turbulent history of invasions and conquests, with long periods of depopulation followed by periods of immigration to Malta and intermarriage with the Maltese by foreigners from the Mediterranean, Western and Southern European countries that ruled Malta.

The many demographic influences on the island include:

• The exile to Malta of the entire male population of the town of Celano (Italy) in 1223
• The stationing of Norman French and Sicilian Italian troops on Malta in 1240
• The removal of all remaining Arabs from Malta in 1224^[12]
• The arrival of several hundred Catalan (Spain) soldiers in 1283
• Further waves of European repopulation throughout the 13th century,^[13]
• The settlement in Malta of noble families from Sicily (Italy) and Aragon (Spain) between 1372 and 1450
• The arrival of several thousand Greek and Rhodian sailors, soldiers and slaves with the Knights of St. John
• The introduction of several thousand Sicilian laborers in 1551 and again in 1566
• The emigration of some 891 Italian exiles to Malta during the Risorgimento in 1849
• The posting of some 22,000 British servicemen in Malta from 1807 to 1979.^[14]

Foreign propaganda

Over time, the rulers of Malta have published their own ethnic study of the population. These studies however, are very unreliable, considering that they were influenced by the ruling power's desire at the time to unite the island with whatever the ruling power was.^[15]

Catholic

During the rule of the Knights of St. John (a time when Malta suffered repeated raids at the hands of the Ottomans and Barbary corsairs), the history books promoted the idea of a continuous, Roman Catholic, native Maltese population, that somehow survived without interuption despite the various conquests of the island.^[16]

British

During British colonial rule, publishings promoted the theory of Phoenician origins, in an attempt to distinguish the Maltese from their Sicilian and Italian neighbours, so as to counter the growing power of the Italian Fascist regime in the Mediterranean.^[17]

Libyan

During the Mintoff years following Independence of Malta, Libya had loaned several million dollars to Malta to make up for the loss of rental income which followed the closure of British military bases in Malta;^[18] Malta and Libya had entered into a Friendship and Cooperation Treaty, in response to repeated overtures by Gaddafi for a closer, more formal union between the two countries; and, for a brief period, Arabic had become a compulsory subject in Maltese secondary schools.^[19] These closer ties with Libya meant a dramatic new (but short-lived) development in Maltese foreign policy: Western media reported that Malta appeared to be turning its back on NATO, the UK, and Europe generally.^[20]

History books were published that began to spread the idea of a disconnection between the Italian and Catholic populations, and instead tried to promote the theory of closer cultural and ethnic ties with North Africa. This new development was noted by Boissevain in 1991:

...the Labour government broke off relations with NATO and sought links with the Arab world. After 900 years of being linked to Europe, Malta began to look southward. Muslims, still remembered in folklore for savage pirate attacks, were redefined as blood brothers.^[21]

However, following the termination of the Mintoff government and backed by popular sentiment, Malta abandoned its fledgling relationship with North Africa and returned its attention and allegiance to NATO and Europe.

The Phoenician origins theory

Some recent studies carried out by geneticists Spencer Wells and Pierre Zalloua of the American University of Beirut collected samples of Y-chromosomes from men living in the Middle East, North Africa, southern Spain, and Malta, places the Phoenicians are known to have settled and traded. According to the study, more than half (50 %) of the Y chromosome lineages that are seen in today's Maltese population could have come in with the Phoenicians. As to why there is such a significant genetic impact, Wells could only speculate, "but the results are consistent with a settlement of people from the Levant within the past 2,000 years, and that points to the Phoenicians." ^[22]

The Southern Italian theory

A major study found that "the contemporary males of Malta most likely originated from Southern Italy, including Sicily and up to Calabria," and that "[t]here is a minuscule amount of input from the Eastern Mediterranean with genetic affinity to Christian Lebanon."^[23] This contradicts the "Phoenician origins" theory. One of the authors of the major study commented as follows on the Wells/Zalloua study:

"We are aware of conflicting conclusions published as an interview in the popular National Geographic magazine. Despite an intensive search we cannot find them reproduced in the mainstream scientific literature. We consider that data somewhat flawed, and furthermore, unsound. National Geographic is not a peer-reviewed academic journal and thus the weight of the evidence is poor compared to other peer-reviewed academic journals that are also in the public domain. One cannot be comfortable with data that have not passed the scrutiny of peer review....

[I]t seems to me that the simplest explanation that cannot be excluded by any of the scientific data thus far available is that Malta was indeed barely inhabited at the turn of the tenth century.

Repopulation is likely to have occurred by a clan or clans (possibly of Arab or Arab-like speaking people) from neighbouring Sicily and Calabria. Possibly, they could have mixed with minute numbers of residual inhabitants, with a constant input of immigrants from neighbouring countries and later, even from afar. There seems to be little input from North Africa."^[24]

See also

• Malta
• List of Maltese people
• History of the Maltese in Gibraltar
• Demographics of Malta

External links

• Godfrey Wettinger, "The Origin of the 'Maltese' Surnames", in Melita Historica New Series, 12 (1999) 4, pp. 333-44. Online at Melita Historica website, last visited January 7, 2007.

References