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Language code: mt

Technical information about ISO 639 language code mt

Documentation

The table below provides technical details for the Maltese language, designated by the mt code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

mt

Name

Official

Maltese

Native

Malti

Family
Semitic
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
Maltese (Main-Island Standard)Gozitan
Related languages
Tunisian ArabicLibyan ArabicAlgerian ArabicStandard Arabic
Key facts
The only living Semitic language that is normally written with the Latin alphabetDescends from medieval Siculo-Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta around the 9th–13th centuriesAbout one-half of its vocabulary comes from Sicilian and Italian, with many newer borrowings from EnglishKeeps the Semitic root-and-pattern word-formation system despite heavy Romance influenceThe phoneme set includes emphatic consonants and a voiced pharyngeal fricative, features rare in European languages.
Sample phrase

Ħelow, kif inti?

Character encodings

ISO 8859-3, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Maltese belongs to the Semitic language family. It is one of the official languages of Malta, and it is written using Latin script (Maltese alphabet). It is estimated that there are more than 570,000 speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

Malta

499K

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Maltese speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

mt-MT – Maltese (Malta)

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