World Language Map

Where is Maltese spoken?

Maltese (Malti) is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Malta. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Maltese is spoken

Maltese is spoken in one country: Malta. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Malta100%469,730

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Maltese is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Maltese.

How many people speak Maltese?

Wikidata gives about 570,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 27th Edition, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Maltese sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Maltese as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Semitic
  3. West Semitic
  4. Central Semitic
  5. Arabian
  6. Arabic
  7. North African Arabic
  8. Western Middle Arabic
  9. Maghrebi
  10. Malta-Tunisian Arabic
  11. Maltese

Related languages

Other languages in the Malta-Tunisian Arabic group:

More about Maltese

Codes: ISO 639-3 mlt, Glottolog malt1254. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Maltese

Where is Maltese spoken?

Maltese is spoken in Malta. Unicode CLDR puts it at 100% of the population of Malta, which is about 469,730 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Maltese?

Wikidata gives about 570,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 27th Edition, 2012). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Maltese in?

Glottolog places Maltese in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Semitic, West Semitic, Central Semitic, Arabian, Arabic, North African Arabic, Western Middle Arabic, Maghrebi and Malta-Tunisian Arabic.

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