Read a Maltese shop sign and you could take it for a Romance language with a few odd letters. Listen to a Maltese grandmother counting change and you'll hear something much closer to Arabic: wieħed, tnejn, tlieta, erbgħa, ħamsa. Both impressions are right. Maltese is a Semitic language, descended from the Arabic spoken in medieval Sicily and Malta, written in the Latin alphabet and full of words from Italian, Sicilian and English.
That mix tells you how to learn Maltese. Let the Romance and English vocabulary come almost for free, and put your real effort into the Semitic core: the sounds, the numbers, the everyday nouns and above all the verbs, which are built on consonant roots. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day will get you greetings, introductions and simple sentences within a month, and you'll start to see the system behind words that looked random on day one.
Where Maltese is spoken
Maltese, Malti, is the national language of Malta and one of its two official languages, alongside English. Around half a million people speak it, most of them on Malta and Gozo, Għawdex in Maltese. There are long-established communities overseas as well, in Australia above all, where Melbourne and Sydney have large Maltese populations, and in Canada, the UK and the US. Since 2004 Maltese has been an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic one, and it is the only Semitic language whose standard form is written in the Latin script.
History is written all over it. Arabic arrived in the Middle Ages. Sicilian and Italian came with the centuries Malta spent as part of the Kingdom of Sicily and then under the Knights of St John, and English came with British rule, which lasted until independence in 1964. Italian was the language of the courts and of educated Maltese until 1934, when Maltese became an official language alongside English.
What makes Maltese easy for English speakers
The alphabet is Latin, and the spelling is consistent: learn the 30 letters and you can read anything aloud. You'll also recognize a fair share of the vocabulary. Bonġu (good morning) and grazzi (thank you) come from Italian, and so do skola (school) and karozza (car). English has contributed plenty too, and Maltese speakers mix English into everyday conversation without a second thought.
The grammar also has fewer moving parts than many European languages. Nouns have two genders and no case endings, and the definite article is a single short word, il-, attached to the front of the noun.
What makes it hard
Five letters to learn properly
| Letter | Sound | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ħ | a strong, breathy h from the throat | ħobż (bread) |
| għ | usually silent, lengthens the vowel beside it | għada (tomorrow) |
| q | a glottal stop, the catch in "uh-oh" | qalb (heart) |
| x | "sh" as in "shop" | xemx (sun) |
| ż | "z" as in "zoo" | żewġ (two, before a noun) |
The rest are quick: ċ is the "ch" in "church", ġ is the "j" in "jam", j is the "y" in "yes", and a plain z sounds like "ts", as in zokkor (sugar).
Roots and patterns
Much of the core vocabulary is built on a set of consonants that carries the meaning, with vowels and extra letters arranged around it. From k-t-b, the root for writing, you get kiteb (he wrote), ktieb (book) and kittieb (writer). Once you can see roots, words start sorting themselves into families, which is a real help, but it takes a few weeks to see them. Anyone who has studied Arabic or Hebrew will find the idea familiar.
Verbs without an infinitive
Maltese has no infinitive. Dictionaries list a verb under its "he did it" form, so you look up kiteb, he wrote, and conjugation works with prefixes and suffixes for person and number. Verbs borrowed from Italian have been folded into the same system, so even the familiar-looking ones need learning.
Plurals and the article
Many plurals are "broken", formed by changing the vowels inside the word: ktieb and kotba (book, books), dar and djar (house, houses), raġel and rġiel (man, men). The article il- changes to match certain first letters, so it's il-kelb (the dog) but ix-xemx (the sun), it-tifel (the boy) and id-dar (the house).
Everyone switches to English
The biggest obstacle isn't grammar. Almost everyone in Malta speaks English, and many people switch the moment they hear a foreign accent, out of politeness. You'll have to ask, sometimes more than once, to keep the conversation in Maltese.
First Maltese words worth knowing
- Bonġu: good morning, hello
- Bonswa: good evening
- Kif int?: how are you?
- Tajjeb, grazzi: fine, thanks
- Grazzi ħafna: thank you very much
- Jekk jogħġbok: please
- Iva and le: yes and no
- Skużi: excuse me, sorry
- Jisimni Marija: my name is Marija
- Ma nafx: I don't know
- Saħħa: bye, and cheers; literally "health"
Half a million speakers, nearly all bilingual
The arithmetic is simple. Maltese has around half a million speakers and nearly all of them speak English, so few schools outside Malta teach it and few publishers print courses for it. Plenty of people want to learn Maltese anyway: foreigners working on the islands, partners of Maltese speakers, Maltese Australians and Canadians reconnecting with a grandparent's language. Many of them begin with a phrasebook and good intentions, and soon find that a phrasebook can't tell them why one book is ktieb and two are kotba.
A plan for the first month
| Week | Focus | By the end you can |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The alphabet, especially ħ, għ, q and x; greetings | Read any word aloud and greet people at any time of day |
| 2 | Numbers 1 to 10; everyday nouns with il- and its changes | Count, shop and name what's around you |
| 3 | Present-tense verbs for "I" and "you"; the ma ... x negative | Say what you do and what you don't |
| 4 | Questions, the broken plurals you've met, five written sentences a day | Hold a short, simple exchange about yourself |
Alongside the plan, ask Maltese friends to stay in Maltese with you for five minutes at a time. Five minutes is a small favor. A whole evening is a lot to ask in a country where switching to English is a reflex.
How to learn Maltese with Qlango
Qlango teaches Maltese at A1 and A2, from Bonġu to straightforward everyday exchanges about your family, your work, shopping and where you live (what A1 and A2 mean). Lessons are short. Spaced repetition brings each word back just before you'd forget it, which is how pairs like ktieb and kotba get filed properly. You answer by picking one of four options, building sentences, finding pairs and writing words yourself, and writing is the surest way to get ħ and għ into the right places. When you add the course, you choose the language you learn through, your native language or one you want to strengthen, and you can start free. Premium adds offline lessons and an AI teacher you can ask, as many times as you like, why the dog is il-kelb but the sun is ix-xemx. The full list of languages shows every course and level.
Sooner or later you'll ask a Maltese friend for those five minutes without English. Start the A1 course in Qlango this week, so that when they say yes, you have five minutes of Maltese ready.
