Maltese Alphabet & Letters

Maltese is written in this order: A B Ċ D E F Ġ G GĦ H Ħ I IE J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Ż Z. That makes 30 letters, six of them vowels (a, e, i, ie, o, u). The dotted letters take the place of their plain partners in the line, so Ċ stands where C would be, Ġ comes just before G and Ż just before Z, while Ħ follows H. Plain C and Y are not part of the alphabet at all; they turn up only in foreign names.

GĦ and IE are written with two characters but count as single letters: dictionaries list għ words after all the g words, and ie words after the i words. At the start of a sentence or a name only the first character is capitalised, as in Għawdex (Gozo) and Ieħor; in full capitals both are, GĦAWDEX.

Maltese is a Semitic language that grew out of the Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta in the Middle Ages, with a large vocabulary taken from Sicilian, Italian and English. It is the only Semitic language with an official Latin-script spelling. The alphabet was finalized by the Għaqda tal-Kittieba tal-Malti (the Association of Maltese Writers) in 1921; its spelling rules were completed in 1924, and today the Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Ilsien Malti (National Council for the Maltese Language) looks after them.

Maltese special letters: Ċ, Ġ, Ħ, Ż, GĦ and IE

The dots and stroke distinguish separate letters, but some Maltese graphemes have more than one pronunciation. Ċ ċ is the ch of English church: ċavetta (key), ċikkulata (chocolate). Ġ ġ is the j of jam: ġobon (cheese), ġelat (ice cream), while plain G stays hard as in grazzi (thank you). Ż ż is the voiced z of zoo: żiemel (horse), żejt (oil), whereas plain Z sounds ts, as in zokkor (sugar) and zalza (sauce).

Ħ ħ, H with a stroke, is a strong breathy h made deep in the throat, the sound of Arabic ح: ħobż (bread), ħabib (friend), ħamsa (five), Ħamrun. Plain H, by contrast, is silent in most words, as in hawn (here) and hu (he). Ħ is the Maltese letter people most often look for, because no ordinary keyboard has it.

GĦ, called ajn, is today mostly silent: it lengthens or colours the vowel next to it, as in għaxra (ten), għasfur (bird) and Għawdex, and at the end of a word it is said like ħ. IE is a long vowel, roughly the ee of see gliding toward a short e: bieb (door), tiegħi (mine). A few other letters differ from English too: J is the y of yes (jien, I; jum, day), Q is a glottal stop, the catch in uh-oh (qalb, heart; qattus, cat), and X is sh (xemx, sun; xita, rain).

Grave accents: à è ì ò ù

Maltese has one accent mark, the grave. It sits on a stressed vowel at the very end of a word, mostly in words that came from Italian: kafè (coffee), università, ċittà (city), Ġesù (Jesus), però (but). The accent shows that the stress falls on that last vowel.

The accent is a real part of the spelling, so kafe without it is a mistake, but the accented vowels are not separate letters and sort together with a, e, i, o and u.

Sun and moon letters, the hyphen and the apostrophe

The Maltese word for the is il-, always joined to its noun by a hyphen. Before the nine sun letters (konsonanti xemxin, named after xemx, sun) — ċ, d, n, r, s, t, x, ż and z — its l turns into that consonant, and the spelling shows it: iċ-ċavetta, id-dar (the house), in-nar (the fire), ir-raġel (the man), is-sajf (summer), it-tifel (the boy), ix-xemx, iż-żiemel, iz-zalza. Before the other moon letters (konsonanti qamrin, from qamar, moon), it stays il-: il-qamar, il-kelb (the dog), il-bieb. Before a vowel or an initial għ or h, it takes the form l-: l-ilma (the water), l-art (the land).

The apostrophe marks a sound that has dropped off. Ta’ (of) and ma’ (with) are short for older tagħ and magħ, and x’ is short for xi (what): X’jismek? (what's your name?), Ta’ Xbiex, Ta’ Qali. Use the curly ’ in printed text; many people type a straight ' and both are read the same. Quotation marks are the curly “…” and ‘…’ of English.

How to type Maltese letters on a keyboard and phone

Windows comes with two Maltese keyboard layouts, Maltese 47-Key and Maltese 48-Key, which put ċ, ġ, ħ and ż on keys of their own; add one in the Windows language settings. Without them, ċ ġ ħ ż have no Alt+number code that works in every program, but in Word you can type the code and press Alt+X: 010B ċ, 010A Ċ, 0121 ġ, 0120 Ġ, 0127 ħ, 0126 Ħ, 017C ż, 017B Ż. The grave vowels do have Alt codes on the number pad: Alt+0224 à, Alt+0232 è, Alt+0236 ì, Alt+0242 ò, Alt+0249 ù, and Alt+0192 À, Alt+0200 È, Alt+0217 Ù; on the US-International layout press ` and then the vowel.

On a Mac, Option+` then a vowel gives à è ì ò ù on the standard layout; the ABC Extended layout adds the dot above with Option+W followed by c, g or z (ċ ġ ż). On phones, add Maltese as a keyboard language (keyboards such as Gboard offer it) so that the dotted letters and ħ appear on the keys, or copy them from the grid above. In HTML the named entities are ċ ċ, ġ ġ, ħ ħ and ż ż, with Ċ, Ġ, Ħ and Ż for the capitals.

Where Maltese is spoken

Maltese, il-Malti, is the national language of Malta and an official language there together with English. CLDR estimates about 470,000 speakers in Malta, on the islands of Malta, Gozo (Għawdex) and Comino (Kemmuna), and there are long-standing Maltese communities abroad, above all in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Since Malta joined the European Union in 2004, Maltese has been one of the EU's official languages.

The euro € has been Malta's currency since 2008, replacing the Maltese lira. For the flag 🇲🇹, the Maltese cross ✠, the food and the festas, see the Malta collection. Maltese shares many words with Arabic and with Italian, so the Arabic and Italian letter collections are its closest neighbours here.