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Maltese (( マルタ語:Malti)) is the national language of Malta and a co-official language of the country alongside English,〔 ( ''Constitution of Malta'', I.5.(1) )〕 while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic (the Arabic dialect that developed in Sicily and later in Malta, between the end of the ninth century and the end of the twelfth century). Maltese itself is therefore linguistically classified as a unique branch of Arabic that has evolved independently of its source into a standardized language over the past 800 years in a gradual process of Latinisation. About half of the vocabulary is derived from standard Italian and Sicilian; English words make up between 6% and 20% of the Maltese vocabulary, according to different estimates.〔 The original Semitic base (Siculo-Arabic) comprises around one-third of the Maltese vocabulary, and typically includes words that denote basic ideas and the function words. Maltese has always been written in the Latin script, the earliest surviving example dating from the late Middle Ages. It remains the only Semitic language written in the Latin script in its standard form. ==History== The origins of the Maltese language are attributed to the arrival, early in the eleventh century, of settlers from neighbouring Sicily, where the Siculo-Arabic dialect was spoken, following the Fatimid conquest at the end of the ninth century.〔(MED Magazine )〕 This claim has been corroborated by genetic studies, which show that contemporary Maltese people share common ancestry with Sicilians and Calabrians, with little genetic input from North Africa and the Levant.〔(A.E. Felice; "The Genetic Origin of Contemporary Maltese," ) ''The Sunday Times of Malta'',5 August 2007.〕〔(C. Capelli, N. Redhead, N. Novelletto, L. Terrenato, P. Malaspina, Z. Poulli, G. Lefranc, A. Megarbane, V. Delague, V. Romano, F. Cali, V.F. Pascali, M. Fellous, A.E. Felice, and D.B. Goldstein; "Population Structure in the Mediterranean Basin: A Y Chromosome Perspective," ) ''Annals of Human Genetics'', 69, 1-20, 2005. Last visited August 8, 2007.〕 The Norman conquest in 1090, followed by the expulsion of the Muslims (complete by 1249) permanently isolated the vernacular from its Arabic source, creating the conditions for its evolution into a distinct language.〔(MED Magazine )〕 In contrast to Sicily (where Siculo-Arabic became extinct, replaced by Sicilian Italian), the vernacular in Malta continued to develop alongside Italian, eventually replacing it as official language in 1934 (alongside English).〔(MED Magazine )〕 The first written reference to the Maltese language is in a will of 1436, where it is called ''lingua maltensi''. The oldest known document in Maltese is "Il Cantilena" (''Xidew il-Qada'') by Pietro Caxaro. It dates from the 15th century.〔 The earliest known Maltese dictionary was a sixteenth-century manuscript entitled "Maltese-Italiano"; it was included in the ''Biblioteca Maltese'' of Mifsud in 1764, but is now lost.〔 A list of Maltese words was included in both the ''Thesaurus Polyglottus'' (1603) and ''Propugnaculum Europae'' (1606) of Hieronymus Megiser, who had visited Malta in 1588–89; Domenico Magri gave the etymologies of some Maltese words in his ''Hierolexicon, sive sacrum dictionarium'' (1677).〔 An early manuscript dictionary, ''Dizionario Italiano e Maltese'', was discovered in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome in the 1980s, together with a grammar, the ''Regole per la Lingua Maltese'', attributed to a French Knight named Thezan.〔Dionisius A. Agius (1990). (Review article: ''Al-Miklem Malti'': A Contribution to Arabic Lexical Dialectology ). ''Bulletin'' (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 17 (2): 171-180. 〕〔Arnold Cassola (2012). (Italo-Maltese Relations (ca. 1150 -1936): People, Culture, Literature, Language ). ''Mediterranean Review'' 5 (1): 1–20.〕 The first systematic lexicon is that of Ġan Pjer Franġisk Agius de Soldanis, who also wrote the first systematic grammar of the language and proposed a standard orthography.〔 Maltese became an official language of Malta in 1934, alongside English, when Italian was dropped from official use. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Maltese language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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