Maltese

Last Updated: 2020-07-01

COMPROMISED: conflation between /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ and between /ts/ and /dz/

Background

Language Family: Afro-Asiatic / Semitic / Central / South / Arabic

• Maltese is spoken in Malta and throughout the European Union.

Phonology

Consonants

• /ʒ/ and /dz/ are commonly included in the phonemic inventory of Maltese through loanword integration; however, their native voiceless counterparts are represented by the same graphemes, which compromised the language (Borg 1997, 248). The ruleset only accounts for the voiceless variants.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Pharyngeal	Glottal
Stops	p b	t̪ d̪				k ɡ		ʔ
Affricates			ts dz	tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v		s z	ʃ ʒ			ħ
Nasals	m		n
Trills			r
Approximants			l		j	w
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive (Borg 1997, 251). See rules for more detail.
• Authors seem to vary in terms of the vowel inventory:
  • Hume (1996): /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/
    
  • Daniels and Bright (1996): /a/ /ɛ/ /i/ /o/ /u/
    
  • Borg (1997): /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/
    
  • Hume et al. (2009): /ɐ/ /ɛ/ /i/ /ɔ/ /u/
    
  • Puech (2016): /a/ /ɛ/ /ɪ/ /ɔ/ /ʊ/
  • NB: Hume et al. (2009) only use phonetic transcriptions, rather than phonemic, so it is ambiguous whether her choices of vowels reflect phonemes rather than realizations.
• Vowels with grave accents (´) tend to appear word-finally, denoting stress; however, we do not account for stress, so accented vowels in this position will be transcribed to their plain representations.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i iː		u uː
Near-High	ɪː
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Diphthongs
/aj/, /ej/, /oj/, /aw/, /ew/, /iw/, /ow/

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/	some authors use /ɐ/
b	/b/
ċ	/tʃ/
d	/d̪/
e	/e/	some authors use /ɛ/
f	/f/
ġ	/dʒ/
g	/ɡ/
h	/ː/; /ħ/	/ː/: lengthens associated vowels (see rules); /ħ/: word-finally
ħ	/ħ/	realized by some speakers as [x] or [h]
i	/i/; /iː/
j	/j/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/	some authors use /ɔ/
p	/p/
q	/ʔ/
r	/r/
s	/s/
t	/t̪/
u	/u/, /uː/	some authors use /ʊ/
v	/v/
w	/w/
x	/ʃ/	/ʒ/ appears in certain loanwords
ż	/z/
z	/ts/	/dz/ appears in certain loanwords
Digraph
għ	/ː/	lengthens associated vowels (see rules)
ie	/ɪː/	some authors use /ie/
aj	/aj/
aw	/aw/
ew	/ew/	occasionally realized as [ow]
għi	/ej/
għu	/ow/
iw	/iw/
oj	/oj/

Misc. Rules

• Clusters of obstruents assimilate to be either fully voiced or fully voiceless (Borg 1997, 250).
• Consonants geminate (Borg 1997, 251–52).
  • Word-final long consonants are sometimes shortened (ibid.).
• In the definite article, ⟨il-⟩, the /l/ typically assimilates to subsequent coronal segments (except /dʒ/) (Borg 1997, 255).
• Long vowels are shortened word-finally (Borg 1997, 267).
• Metathesis of the definite article occurs before Italian-derived words with initial sibilants (Borg 1997, 273).
• The ⟨h⟩ in the suffixed pronouns (⟨-ha⟩, ⟨-hom⟩) is replaced by a glide after stressed stem-final vowels (Borg 1997, 261).
• Elision of short vowels occurs in unstressed open syllables (Borg 1997, 273).
• CCC clusters are pronounced as CVCC when the middle C is a sonorant (Borg 1997, 274).
• ⟨għ⟩ represents the Old Arabic phones [ʕ] or [ɣ], which were deleted at some point during the evolution of modern Maltese (Borg 1997, 261).
• ⟨h⟩ represents the Old Arabic phone [h], which was deleted at some point during the evolution of modern Maltese (Borg 1997, 259).

References

Borg, Alexander. 1997. “Maltese Phonology.” In Phonologies of Asia and Africa, edited by Daniels, Peter T. and Kaye, Alan S., 245–85. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. 1996. “Table 59.25: Maltese Alphabet.” New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_mlt_ortho-1.

Hume, Elizabeth. 1996. “Coronal Consonant, Front Vowel Parallels in Maltese.” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 14: 213–60.

Hume, Elizabeth, Jennifer Venditti, Alexandra Vella, and Samantha Gett. 2009. “Vowel Duration and Maltese ’Għ’.” In Introducing Maltese Linguistics: Selected Papers from the 1st International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, Bremen, 18-20 October 2007, edited by et al. Comrie, Bernard, 15–46.

Puech, Gilbert. 2016. “Minimalist Representation of Maltese Sounds.” In Shifts and Patterns in Maltese, edited by Puech, Gilbert and Saade, Benjamin.