Maltese people

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 Census)) United States:    35,540 (2002 Community Survey)) Brazil:    58,000< Canada:    37,125 (2006 Census)) Ireland:    285 (2006) Gibraltar:    100
Languages
Maltese, English, Italian
Religion
Roman Catholic.

The Maltese people or Maltese are a 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

Main article: History of Malta

Malta has been inhabited from around 5200 BC, since the arrival of the Sicani tribe from the Italian island of Sicily. 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, the islands were conquered by the Arabs in AD 870. The Arabs, who generally tolerated the population's Christianity, introduced the cultivation of citrus fruits and cotton, and irrigation systems. Arab influence can be seen most prominently in the modern Maltese language, which is 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 to 1530 when the Order of St. John came to Malta, the original Italic, Phoenician and Byzantine population from the Roman period was further reinforced by other European elements - a period of 440 years.

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

Main article: Culture of Malta

Language

Main article: Maltese 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, a semitic dialect spoken in Sicily and surrounding Southern Italy. However in the course of Malta's recent history, the language has adopted large volumes of vocabulary, grammar, and lexology 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

Main article: Languages of Malta

Bilingualism and even multilingualism is quite 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.

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.

Religion

Main article: Religion in Malta

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.

Possible genetic links

The origins debate

The genetic or ethnic origins of the Maltese people 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, including the exile to Malta of the entire male population of the town of Celano (Italy) in 1223, the stationing of a Norman and Sicilian garrison on Malta in 1240, the expulsion from Malta of Arabs commencing in 1245, the arrival of several hundred Catalan soldiers in 1283, the European repopulation of Malta that began in the 13th century, the settlement in Malta of noble families from Sicily and Aragon 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 labourers in 1551 and again in 1566, the emigration to Malta of some 891 Italian exiles during the Risorgimento in 1849, and the posting of some 22,000 British servicemen in Malta from 1807 to 1979.

Historical and ethnic studies published and promoted by the various ruling classes during their governance over Malta provide little, if any, valuable guidance on the question of Maltese ethnicity, given that their conclusions appear to have been driven, in large part, by political expediency. Hence, Maltese history books published during the rule of the Knights of St. John, at a time when Malta and Gozo suffered repeated razzias at the hands of the Ottomans and Barbary corsairs, promoted the myth of a continuous, Roman Catholic, native Maltese population, that somehow survived despite the Arab conquest of Malta and the depopulation that followed. Studies and reports published during the British colonial period promoted the theory of Phoenician origins, in an attempt to distinguish the Maltese from their Sicilian and Italian neighbours, or in the case of the Catholic Church, to distinguish the Maltese from the Arab peoples that controlled Malta prior to the liberation of Malta by the Normans. By contrast, history books published during the Mintoff years following Independence began to question the earlier beliefs in a continuous, indigenous population of Christian Maltese and, in some cases, quietly promoted 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.

This latter development coincided with and reflected dramatic new (but short-lived) developments in Maltese foreign policy: Western media reported that Malta appeared to be turning its back on NATO, the United Kingdom, and Europe generally; 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; 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. 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."

The Phoenician background of the Maltese suggests possible cultural, religious, and linguistic links to Lebanese Maronites (also descended from Phoenicians revealed during National Geographic's Special), who speak a variety of Arabic and are Christian. [4]

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." This contradicts the "Phoenician origins" theory, and states that the main Maltese population originally came from the Sicani tribes on Sicily. There 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."

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.