Maltese people


The Maltese are a nation and ethnic group native to Malta who speak Maltese, a Semitic language. Malta is an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Included within the ethnic group defined by the Maltese people are the Gozitans who inhabit Malta's sister island, Gozo.

History

The current Maltese people, characterised by the use of the Maltese language and by Roman Catholicism, are the descendants – through much mixing and hybridisation – of colonists from Sicily and Calabria who repopulated the Maltese islands in the beginning of the second millennium after a two-century lapse of depopulation that followed the Arab conquest by the Aghlabids in AD 870.
A genetic study by Capelli et al. indicates that Malta was barely inhabited at the turn of the tenth century and was likely to have been repopulated by settlers from Sicily and Calabria who spoke Siculo-Arabic.
Previous inhabitants of the islands – Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines – did not leave many traces, as most nameplaces were lost and replaced.
The Normans conquered the island in 1091 and completely re-Christianised them by 1249. This re-Christianisation created the conditions for the evolution of the Maltese language from the now extinct Siculo-Arabic dialect.
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:
Over time, the various rulers of Malta published their own view of the ethnicity of the population. The Knights of Malta downplayed the role of Islam in Malta and promoted the idea of a continuous Roman Catholic presence,.

Genetics

are found at the following frequencies in Malta: R1 , J, I, E, F, K, P. Haplogroup R1 and I are typical in European populations and E, K, F and J haplogroups consist of lineages with differential distribution mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. The study by Capelli et al. has concluded that the contemporary males of Malta most likely originated from Southern Italy. The study also indicates that Malta was barely inhabited at the turn of the tenth century and was likely to have been repopulated by settlers from Sicily and Calabria who spoke Siculo-Arabic. These findings confirm the onomastic and linguistic evidence presented in 1993 by Geoffrey Hull, who traced the oldest Maltese surnames to southern and south-eastern Sicily, especially the Agrigento district.
The study of Capelli et al. 2015 clustered the male Maltese genetic markers with those of Sicilians and Calabrians, and showed a miniscule input from the Eastern Mediterranean with genetic affinity to Christian Lebanon.
Another study carried out by geneticists Spencer Wells and Pierre Zalloua of the American University of Beirut claimed that more than 50% of Y-chromosomes from Maltese men could have Phoenician origins. However, it is noted that this study is not peer reviewed and is contradicted by major peer reviewed studies, which prove that the Maltese share common ancestry with Southern Italians, having negligible genetic input from the Eastern Mediterranean or North Africa.

Culture

The culture of Malta is a reflection of various cultures that have come into contact with the Maltese Islands throughout the centuries, including neighbouring Mediterranean cultures, and the cultures of the nations that ruled Malta for long periods of time prior to its independence in 1964.
The culture of modern Malta has been described as a "rich pattern of traditions, beliefs and practices," which is the result of "a long process of adaptation, assimilation and cross fertilization of beliefs and usages drawn from various conflicting sources." It has been subjected to the same complex, historic processes that gave rise to the linguistic and ethnic admixture that defines who the people of Malta and Gozo are today.

Language

Maltese people speak the Maltese language, a unique hybrid vernacular basically Semitic but with an imposing Romance superstratum, and written in the Latin alphabet in its standard form. The language is descended from Siculo-Arabic, an extinct dialect of Arabic that was spoken in Sicily by indigenous people who were at that time divided in religion into continuing Greek-rite Christians and Muslims whose recent ancestors were Sicilian converts from Christianity. In the course of Malta's history, the language has adopted massive amounts of vocabulary from Sicilian and Italian, to a much lesser degree, borrowings from English, and a few dozen French loanwords. A large number of superficially Arabic words and idioms are actually loan translations from Sicilian and Italian which would make little or no sense to speakers of other Arabic-derived languages.
Maltese became an official language of Malta in 1934, replacing Italian and joining English. There are an estimated 371,900 speakers in Malta of the language, with statistics citing that 100% of the people are able to speak Maltese, 88% English, 66% Italian and 17% French, showing a greater degree of linguistic capabilities than most other European countries. In fact multilingualism is a common phenomenon in Malta, with English, Maltese and on occasion Italian, used in everyday life. Whilst Maltese is the national language, it has been suggested that with the ascendancy of English a language shift may begin; though a survey dating to 2005 suggested that the percentage speaking Maltese as their mother tongue within Malta remained at 97%.

Religion

The Constitution of Malta provides for freedom of religion but establishes Roman Catholicism as the state religion. The original Maltese population were Christians of the Byzantine rite, like the older Christian communities of Sicily. Consequently the most ancient layer of liturgical vocabulary in Maltese consists of Greek and Arabic words. The Roman rite was imposed throughout the islands in the early fourteenth century, though the Greek Catholic church was re-established after 1530 by the Knights of Saint John for their Rhodian and other Greek followers.
Malta is described in the Book of Acts as the place where Paul the Apostle was shipwrecked on his way to Rome, awaiting trial. Freedom House and the World Factbook report that 98% of the Maltese are Catholic, making the nation one of the most Catholic countries in the world.

Emigration

Malta has long been a country of emigration, with big Maltese communities in English-speaking countries abroad as well as in France.
Mass emigration picked up in the 19th century, reaching its peak in the decades after World War II. Migration was initially to north African countries ; later Maltese migrants headed towards the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia. There is little trace left of the Franco-Maltese communities in north Africa, most of them having been displaced, after the rise of independence movements, to places like France, the United Kingdom or Australia. The Franco-Maltese are culturally distinct from the Maltese from Malta, in that the former have remained attached to the use of the Italian language as well as speaking French. Although migration has ceased to be a social phenomenon of significance there are still important Maltese communities in Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Emigration dropped dramatically after the mid-1970s and has since ceased to be a social phenomenon of significance.
Since Malta joined the EU in 2004 expatriate communities emerged in a number of European countries particularly in Belgium and Luxembourg.