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Siculo-Arabic
Siculo-Arabic or Sicilian Arabic is a group of Arabic variaties that were spoken in the Emirate of Sicily (which included Malta) from the 9th century, persisting under the subsequent County of Sicily, Norman rule until the 13th century. It was derived from Arabic following the Muslim conquest of Sicily, Abbasid conquest of Sicily in the 9th century and gradually marginalized following the Norman conquest of southern Italy, Norman conquest in the 11th century. Siculo-Arabic is extinct and is designated as a historical language that is attested only in writings from the 9th–13th centuries in Sicily. However, present-day Maltese language, Maltese is considered to be its sole surviving descendant. Maltese evolved from one of the dialects of Siculo-Arabic over the past 800 years and a gradual process of wikt:Special:Search/latinisation, Latinisation that gave Maltese a significant superstrate influence from Romance languages. By contrast, present-day Sicilian language, Sicilian, whi ...
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Maltese Language
Maltese (, also or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language derived from Siculo-Arabic, late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance languages, Romance Stratum (linguistics), superstrata. It is the only Semitic languages, Semitic language predominantly written in the Latin script. It is spoken by the Maltese people and is the national language of Malta, and is the only languages of the European Union, official Semitic and Afroasiatic language of the European Union. According to John L. Hayes, it descended from a Maghrebi Arabic, North African dialect of Colloquial Arabic which was introduced to Malta when the Aghlabid dynasty, Aghlabids captured it in 869/870 CE. It is also said to have descended from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent history of religion in Malta#Arrival of Christianity, re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved indepe ...
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Arabic
Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as ( "the eloquent Arabic") or simply ' (). Arabic is the List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official language, third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations, and the Sacred language, liturgical language of Islam. Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the wo ...
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Pantesco Dialect
Pantesco is the Sicilian dialect of the island of Pantelleria, between Sicily and Tunisia. It is notable among Romance varieties for an unusually high degree of influence from Arabic, originating in Arabic dialect similar to Maltese, which was spoken on the island until around the 19th century and is substratal to Pantesco. Many Arabic loanwords are found in Pantesco, for example ''hurrìhi'' ("nettle") and ''kardèna'' ("tick"). These terms frequently refer to a rural lifestyle, have negative connotations or are even limited to use with reference to animals, reflecting the low prestige of the extinct Arabic dialect. In such loans, the glottal fricative h (unusual for a Romance dialect) is preserved as a reflex of Arabic laryngeals h/x/ħ and sometimes even q. In addition to lexical and phonological influence, the grammar of Pantesco shows Arabic influence in its formation of the periphrastic future and the pluperfect. Pantesco uses unstressed subject pronoun clitics to form a ...
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Sicilian Language
Sicilian (, ; ) is a Romance languages, Romance language that is spoken on the island of Sicily and its satellite islands. It belongs to the broader Extreme Southern Italian language group (in Italian ). ''Ethnologue'' (see #Ethnologue report, below for more detail) describes Sicilian as being "distinct enough from Italian language, Standard Italian to be considered a separate language", and it is recognized as a minority language by UNESCO. It has been referred to as a language by the Sicilian Region. It has the oldest literary tradition of the Italo-Dalmatian languages, Italo-Romance languages. A version of the ''UNESCO Courier'' is also available in Sicilian. Status Sicilian is spoken by most inhabitants of Sicily and by emigrant populations around the world. The latter are found in the countries that attracted large numbers of Sicilians, Sicilian immigrants during the course of the past century or so, especially the United States (specifically in the Gravesend, Brooklyn ...
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Varieties Of Arabic
Varieties of Arabic (or dialects or vernaculars) are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. Arabic is a Semitic languages, Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related to geographical distance and some that are mutually unintelligible. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize (or distinguish) the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects as well as local native languages and dialects. Some organizations, such as SIL International, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be separate languages, while others, such as the Library of Congress, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic. In terms of ...
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Maghrebi Arabic
Maghrebi Arabic, often known as ''ad-Dārija'' to differentiate it from Literary Arabic, is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken in the Maghreb. It includes the Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, Hassaniya and Saharan Arabic dialects. Maghrebi Arabic has a predominantly Semitic and Arabic vocabulary, although it contains a significant number of Berber loanwords, which represent 2–3% of the vocabulary of Libyan Arabic, 8–9% of Algerian and Tunisian Arabic, and 10–15% of Moroccan Arabic. Maghrebi Arabic was formerly spoken in Al-Andalus and Sicily until the 17th and 13th centuries, respectively, in the extinct forms of Andalusi Arabic and Siculo-Arabic. The Maltese language is believed to have its source in a language spoken in Muslim Sicily that ultimately originates from Tunisia, as it contains some typical Maghrebi Arabic areal characteristics. Proto-Maghrebi Arabic Phonology The common ancestor of Maghrebi Arabic had the same phonology as Modern Stan ...
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Malta
Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country in Southern Europe located in the Mediterranean Sea, between Sicily and North Africa. It consists of an archipelago south of Italy, east of Tunisia, and north of Libya. The two official languages are Maltese language, Maltese and English language, English. The country's capital is Valletta, which is the smallest capital city in the EU by both area and population. It was also the first World Heritage Site, World Heritage City in Europe to become a European Capital of Culture in 2018. With a population of about 542,000 over an area of , Malta is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, tenth-smallest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population density, ninth-most densely populated. Various sources consider the country to consist of a single urban region, for which it is often described as a city-state. Malta has been inhabited since at least 6500 BC, during the Mesolith ...
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Semitic Languages
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya language, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew language, Hebrew, Maltese language, Maltese, Modern South Arabian languages and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of Western Asia, West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large Immigration, immigrant and Expatriate, expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three Generations of Noah, sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. Semitic languages List of languages by first written account, occur in written form from a very early historical date in West Asia, with East Semitic languages, East Semitic Akkadian language, Akkadian (also known as Ancient Assyrian language, Assyrian ...
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County Of Sicily
The County of Sicily was a Norman state comprising the islands of Sicily and Malta and part of Calabria from 1071 until 1130. The county began to form during the Norman conquest of Sicily (1061–91) from the Muslim Emirate, established by conquest in 965. The county is thus a transitional period in the history of Sicily. After the Muslims had been defeated and either forced out or incorporated into the Norman military, a further period of transition took place for the county and the Sicilians. History The County of Sicily was created by Robert Guiscard in 1071 for his younger brother Roger Bosso. Guiscard himself had received the title Duke of Sicily (''dux Siciliae'') in 1059 from Pope Nicholas II as encouragement to conquer it from the Muslims. In 1061 the first permanent Norman conquest (Messina) was made and in 1071, after the fall of Palermo, the capital of the emirate and future capital of the county, Guiscard invested Roger with the title of count and gave him full ...
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Superstrate
In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for 'layer') or strate is a historical layer of language that influences or is influenced by another language through contact. The notion of "strata" was first developed by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, and became known in the English-speaking world through the work of two different authors in 1932. Both concepts apply to a situation where an intrusive language establishes itself in the territory of another, typically as the result of migration. Whether the superstratum case (the local language persists and the intrusive language disappears) or the substratum one (the local language disappears and the intrusive language persists) applies will normally only be evident after several generations, during which the intrusive language exists within a diaspora culture. In order for the intrusive language to persist, the ''substratum'' case, the immigrant population will either need to take the position of a political elite or immigrate i ...
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Emirate Of Sicily
The island of SicilyIn Arabic, the island was known as (). was under Islam, Islamic rule from the late ninth to the late eleventh centuries. It became a prosperous and influential commercial power in the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean, with its capital of Palermo serving as a major cultural and political center of the Muslim world. Sicily was a peripheral part of the Byzantine Empire when Muslim forces from Ifriqiya (roughly present-day Tunisia) began launching raids in 652. During the reign of the Aghlabid dynasty of Ifriqiya, a Muslim conquest of Sicily, prolonged series of conflicts from 827 to 902 resulted in the gradual conquest of the entire island, with only the stronghold of Rometta, in the far northeast, Siege of Rometta, holding out until 965. The Fatimid Caliphate replaced Aghlabid rule after 909. From 948 onwards, the island was governed by the Kalbid dynasty, who ruled as autonomous emirs while formally acknowledging Fatimid authority. Under Muslim rule, Sicily ...
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Byzantine Greek Language
Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic; Greek: ) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. From the 7th century onwards, Greek was the only language of administration and government in the Byzantine Empire. This stage of language is thus described as Byzantine Greek. The study of the Medieval Greek language and literature is a branch of Byzantine studies, the study of the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire. The conquests of Alexander the Great, and the ensuing Hellenistic period, had caused Greek to spread throughout Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean. The beginning of Medieval Greek is occasionally dated back to as early as the 4th century, either to 330 AD, when the political centre of the Roman Empire was moved to Constantinople, or to 395 AD, the division o ...
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