Malta covers just over 300 km² in land area, making it one of Europe's smallest and one of Europe's most densely populated countries. Its de facto capital is Valletta and the largest city is Birkirkara. Maltese is the national language and a co-official language, alongside English.
The Maltese language (Maltese: Malti) is the constitutional national language of Malta. The Constitution also enshrines it as the country's official language, alongside English. Italian was the official language of Malta until 1934, when English and Maltese replaced it.
Maltese is a Semitic language descended from Siculo-Arabic (from southern Italy). The Maltese alphabet consists of 30 letters based on the Latin alphabet, including the diacritically altered letters ż, ċ and ġ, as well as the letters għ, ħ, and ie.
Maltese has substantial borrowing from Sicilian, Italian, a little French, and more recently, and increasingly, English.[83] The language includes different dialects that can vary strongly from one town to another or from one island to the other.
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