Living Languages in Malta PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Living Languages in Malta PDF full book. Access full book title Living Languages in Malta by Lydia Sciriha. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Lydia Sciriha
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789993204633
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Lydia Sciriha
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789993204633
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Albert Gatt
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961100705
Category : Malta
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Get Book Here
Book Description
The purpose of this volume is to present a snapshot of the state of the art of research on the languages of the Maltese islands, which include spoken Maltese, Maltese English and Maltese Sign Language. Malta is a tiny, but densely populated country, with over 422,000 inhabitants spread over only 316 square kilometers. It is a bilingual country, with Maltese and English enjoying the status of official languages. Maltese is a descendant of Arabic, but due to the history of the island, it has borrowed extensively from Sicilian, Italian and English. Furthermore, local dialects still coexist alongside the official standard language. The status of English as a second language dates back to British colonial rule, and just as in other former British colonies, a characteristic Maltese variety of English has developed. To these languages must be added Maltese Sign Language, which is the language of the Maltese Deaf community. This was recently recognised as Malta’s third official language by an act of Parliament in 2016. While a volume such as the present one can hardly do justice to all aspects of a diverse and complex linguistic situation, even in a small community like that of Malta, our aim in editing this book was to shed light on the main strands of research being undertaken in the Maltese linguistic context. Six of the contributions in this book focus on Maltese and explore a broad range of topics including: historical changes in the Maltese sound system; syllabification strategies; the interaction of prosody and gesture; the constraints regulating /t/-insertion; the productivity of derivational suffixes; and raising phenomena. The study of Maltese English, especially with the purpose of establishing the defining characteristics of this variety of English, is a relatively new area of research. Three of the papers in this volume deal with Maltese English, which is explored from the different perspectives of rhythm, the syntax of nominal phrases, and lexical choice. The last contribution discusses the way in which Maltese Sign Language (LSM) has evolved alongside developments in LSM research. In summary, we believe the present volume has the potential to present a unique snapshot of a complex linguistic situation in a geographically restricted area. Given the nature and range of topics proposed, the volume will likely be of interest to researchers in both theoretical and comparative linguistics, as well as those working with experimental and corpus-based methodologies. Our hope is that the studies presented here will also serve to pave the way for further research on the languages of Malta, encouraging researchers to also take new directions, including the exploration of variation and sociolinguistic factors which, while often raised as explanatory constructs in the papers presented here, remain under-researched.
Author: Jeffrey P. Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021200
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 363
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book documents the lesser-known varieties of English which have been overlooked and understudied within the canon of English linguistics.
Author: Lydia Sciriha
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144389236X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Get Book Here
Book Description
The seventeen chapters brought together in this volume represent a selection of papers presented at the International Conference on Bilingualism held in March 2015 at the University of Malta’s Valletta campus. The multifaceted nature of the conference is evident in the diverse viewpoints from a range of authors who analyse aspects of the linguistic situations in Brazil, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Macau, Malta, Poland, Romania, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom. The volume comprises chapters on Code-Switching, Linguistic Landscape, Bilingualism, Culture and Identity, Language Policy, Bilingual Education, and Trilingualism. This book is a valuable resource not only for students and scholars, but also for language teachers interested in the variegated nature of bilingualism in various countries in Europe, Asia, and South America.
Author: Thomas Freller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789993272977
Category : Malta
Languages : en
Pages : 359
Get Book Here
Book Description
The urban, cultural and political profile of the Maltese islands is deeply marked by the presence for 268 years of the Knights of St John. The Order has left its mark decisively in the collective memory of the Maltese. Malta: The Order of St John gives a global picture of this multinational institution in those crucial years when Grand Master L'Isle Adam moved the convent from Rhodes to Malta, when legendary Grand Master Valette withstood the Turkish assault in 1565, when Grand Masters Wignacourt, Cotoner and Carafa turned Malta into a centre of Mediterraean corsairing and Grand Masters Vilhena and Pinto tried to imitate the Central European absolutist princes. It all came to a sudden - but not unexpected - end in 1798 when Grand Master Hompesch handed over Malta to the rising star on the European horizon, Napoleon. The various diplomatic attempts of the knights to regain their island all failed. The book also provides the reader with an overview of the most important monuments connected with the knights on Malta and Gozo.
Author: Irena Kobald
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544432282
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 37
Get Book Here
Book Description
When a little girl nicknamed "Cartwheel" moves to a different country with her family to be safe she has a hard time adjusting to her new home.
Author: Grazio Falzon
Publisher: Hippocrene Books
ISBN: 9780781805650
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book includes an introduction to basic grammar, a pronunciation guide, and phrases on all topics a visitor to Malta might need to know.
Author: Lydia Sciriha
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527560597
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume reports on bilingual practices in contemporary societies in a number of European and non-European countries. The topics discussed here include language use and language learning in a bilingual context, issues in bilingual education, the use of language in the linguistic landscape, language and the media, language perceptions, language use and attitudes, and the use of language as a vantage point for the study of social change. This book captures the various different approaches and viewpoints on bilingualism by researchers who have focused on contexts such as Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden and the USA. Of the 17 chapters here, five deal with aspects of bilingualism in Malta, which, in view of its minuscule size but complex language use, offers itself as an excellent laboratory for the scientific study of bilingualism.
Author: David Singleton
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614512817
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume approaches contemporary multilingualism as a new linguistic dispensation, in urgent need of research-led, reflective scrutiny. The book addresses the emergent global and local patterns of multingual use and acquisition across the world and explores the major trends that characterize today's multilingualism. It is divided into three parts on the basis of the broad themes: education (including multilingual learning in its general, theoretical aspects), sociolinguistic dimensions and language policy. The book's fifteen chapters, written by renowned international experts, discuss a range of issues relating to the quintessential and unique properties of multilingual situations – issues relevant to the challenges faced in different ways by researcher and practitioners alike. All the contributions share a focus on currently operative patterns of interaction between contexts, events and processes.
Author: Joseph M. Brincat
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789993273431
Category : Maltese language
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Throughout the ages, the Maltese language has undergone a series of internal changes as well as modifications and accretions caused by various external forces. Internal changes are not easy to date and explain because they require a painstaking comparative exercise that can be carried out only by experts in Semitic languages. As a result, their systematic description in a historical grammar of Maltese has not yet been published. By contrast, the external history of Maltese is essentially an account of its contact with various languages. All languages are marked by contact, albeit to varying degrees. Gumperz holds that "most words in most modern languages would count as borrowed" (1982: 67), but what makes Maltese unique is that it blends together elements from three distinct language families: the Semitic, the Romance, and the Germanic. The language spoken in Malta today is the result of a process that has been going on for a thousand years and, consequently, the account presented in this book will show how social, political, and cultural events are reflected in the changing face of the language. As the lexicon is the most tangible aspect of a language, it will naturally be privileged in this account. Thanks to its position exactly at the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, 90 km from Sicily and 290 km from the Tunisian coast, Malta's relations have not been limited to its immediate neighbours, Sicily and North Africa. Since time immemorial, Malta has been at the mercy of all the great naval powers that sailed the Sicilian channel. As a result, the Maltese language has been shaped by its inhabitants' interactions with all the peoples who, throughout the centuries, have landed on the islands to govern it or establish colonies there. In a territory as small as 27 km by 14 km, the ratio between the numbers of the rulers and the ruled is highly significant. For thousands of years, when the inhabitants had to live off the islands' resources, the size of the population must have been consistently small, around 5,000 in all; this factor may have allowed the language to be substituted a number of times. This may surprise us today, but before the Romantic Age, people had a very pragmatic view of language. Like any other tool, language was prized mostly for its efficiency. The population of the Maltese islands has multiplied in the past one thousand years, rising to around 400,000, and such a rapid increase in such a small place could not fail to exert a strong influence on the linguistic scenario. The increase in population was due not only to natural growth but also to cumulative waves of settlers from abroad. Social interaction between the locals and the visitors was strong, bilingual communication took place in various domains at all social levels and relations were especially strong when mixed marriages took place. For this reason, a history of the Maltese language must be seen in the wider context of a linguistic history of the Maltese islands, and will offer linguists belonging to both the historical and typological fields an intriguing case study of what can be considered a "minor" language from the international point of view (used only in a small state, but spoken by the great majority of the islanders) which has managed to survive alongside a series of "major" languages such as Arabic, Latin, Sicilian, Italian, and English, languages which were widely spoken and written abroad and which also enjoyed prestige in Malta itself, but whose local circulation was generally limited to the literate minority.
