The Arabic Language

deher
[deːr] ‘to appear’ (Arabic 
ḏ̣
ahara
). All emphatic consonants have become non-emphatic. Yet, in spite of the 
fact that most Maltese regard their language as different from Arabic, almost all 
proposals for the orthography of the language were historicising: they attempted 
to restore the Arabic structure in writing in those cases where it had been obscured 
by phonetic developments. Thus, the combinations 
għa
and 
agħ
are distinguished 
in the orthography, but pronounced similarly [aː] in words such as 
għamlu
‘they 
did’ (Arabic 
ʿamilū
) and 
jagħmlu
‘they do’ (Arabic 
yaʿmalū
).
The most striking feature of the language is the enormous amount of Italian 
and Sicilian loans, which have become completely integrated in the structure 
of the language. Although examples may be quoted from other dialects which 
accommodated foreign loans, Maltese Arabic is exceptional both in the amount of 
loans from Italian (and in recent times from English) and in the effect which the 
influx of loanwords had on the morphology of the language. The usual process 
of integration of loanwords in Arabic dialects is by root-abstraction (cf. above, 
p. 229), and this is the way in which older loans were incorporated in Maltese. 
In root-abstraction, the consonants of the foreign word constitute a new root 
in Arabic, to which Arabic morphological patterns may be applied. Italian 
serpe
‘snake’, for instance, was borrowed as 
serp
and received a broken plural 
sriep
; from 
Italian 
pittore
‘painter’ > Maltese 
pittur
a new verb 
pitter
was coined.
As Mifsud (1995) demonstrates, the influx of foreign loans in Maltese was so 
massive that it led to a change in the morphological structure of the language, 
from a root-based to a stem-based morphology. The procedure of root-abstraction 
ceased to be productive, and foreign words were integrated in a different way. Most 
Italian verbs were borrowed on the basis of their imperative or the third-person 
singular of the present; in Maltese, these verbs end in 
-a
, for example, Maltese 
ċeda
‘to give up’ from the Italian verb 
cedere
, or 
falla
‘to fail’ from the Italian verb 
fallire
. This process was facilitated by the fact that a large category of verbs in 
Maltese, that of the weak verbs, also end in 
-a
. Thus, Italian loans such as 
ċeda
(
ċ 
representing 
č
)
 
and 
falla
became indistinguishable from Arabic Maltese verbs 
such as 
mexa
‘to walk’, 
mexxa
‘to lead’ (
x 
representing 
š
). The same pattern also 
accommodated other verbs with more complicated stems, for example, 
sploda
‘to 
explode’, 
sofra
‘to suffer’. The accumulation of Italian loans in this category led to a 
reinterpretation of the inflected forms: 
mexxeyna
‘we led’, 
falleyna
‘we failed’ were 
interpreted not as the second measure of the radicals 
m-š-y
with the ending 
-na
(root + verbal pattern + suffix), but rather as a stem with a suffix, that is, 
mexx-eyna
. 
The Italian verbs received a Maltese imperfect, from one of the two categories of 
Maltese Arabic, in 
-a
or 
-i
, for example, 
salva
/
ysalva
‘to save’ (Italian 
salvare
); 
solva
/
ysolvi
‘to solve’ (Italian 
solvere
), probably on the basis of their conjugation in Italian: 
verbs in 
-are
received a Maltese imperfect in 
-a
, those in 
-ere
, 
-ire
an imperfect in 
-i
. The inflection of such loan verbs is entirely in line with that of the Maghrebi 
dialects, including the 
n-
prefix for the first-person singular (Table 15.1).

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Arabic as a Minority Language 
279
kanta kantaw jkanta jkantaw
kantat
tkanta 
kantajt kantajtu tkanta tkantaw
kantajt kantajna nkanta nkantaw
Table 15.1 The verbal paradigm of the loan verb 
kanta 
‘to sing’ (< Italian 
cantare
) in Maltese
A similar development took place in the nominal system. Since Arabic nouns 
are usually triradical and most plurals are formed with discontinuous morphemes 
(broken plurals), foreign words are not easily integrated. In Maltese, the integra
-
tion of Italian loans was accomplished by a reinterpretation of their form, by 
taking into account only the last two syllables of the word. Thus, loanwords such as 
umbrella
‘umbrella’ (Italian 
ombrello
, English 
umbrella
), 
gwerra
‘war’ (Italian 
guerra
) 
received the broken plurals 
umbrelel
and 
gwerer
. In this way, the difference between 
Italian morphology operating with suffixes and Maltese Arabic morphology 
operating with discontinuous patterns was eliminated, and the way was opened 
for the introduction of any foreign loan. In recent times, however, there has arisen 
a tendency not to provide English words with broken plurals, but to borrow them 
together with their English plural morpheme 
-s
, for example, 
telefon
/
telefons
.
Text 1 Maltese (from