A dialect is like a child with boundless creativity, but not quite the well-behaved, disciplined type. Strangers may find him quirky and hard to understand, but to his family, he’s an irreplaceable and cherished member.
This feeling is all too familiar, especially for diaglossic communities, like Bavarian or Swiss Germans who barely fit in with High-German speakers. Let’s sail across the Mediterranean and see what history tells us about dialects and languages.
Dialects that swallowed their mother tongue
We start in Andalusia, where Arabic co-existed with Latin for over 700 years. Like all Latin speakers, indigenous Andalusians knew two varieties of their tongue: the Classical Latin of the elite, and the Vulgar Latin that evolved among Roman soldiers and traders and mixed with older tongues. This latter mixed with the Arabic of conquerers, creating hybrid dialects referred to as Mozarabic.
Despite leading the Reconquista against the Muslims, the Kingdom of Castile embraced Arabic literature and science. In a revolutionary move against the Vatican, its rulers promoted translation and learning in the local variety of Latin, thus pushing for standardization of the Castilian dialect. As they celebrated the fall of Muslim Granada in 1492, they also celebrated the first Castilian grammar book in the same year. Influenced by Mozarabic, this was the first grammar of a modern European language and the birth of what we now call Spanish.
Over time, all regional Vulgar Latin dialects—like Portuense, Parisian, and Florentine—evolved into distinct languages with their own literary and political identities. This marked the beginning of the end of the Latin age.
The Arabic that gained independence
Next is Malta. If Mozarabic was Latin flavored with Arabic, Maltese is Arabic flavored with Latin. For over 200 years, Malta’s population became fully Arabized and spoke a form of Tunisian Arabic. However, after the Norman conquest in 1091 and the mass conversion to Christianity, Malta’s Arabic was slowly cut off from the rest of Arabs.
Latin replaced Arabic as the language of scholarship, and law – thus the main source of texts and concepts – while Maltese Arabic remained mostly an oral tradition. Later, Italian became the language of the Maltese elite, until the British arrived in 1800 and introduced English. Yet ever since the 1700s, locals had been struggling to make their mother tongue a written language, with dictionaries and grammar guides emerging. This culminated in 1934, when Maltese became Malta’s national language.
Dialects that gave birth to dialects
Finally, Cyprus, where a small Christian community speaks Cypriot Maronite Arabic, a dialect on the verge of disappearing into Greek. But what kind of Greek?
Ancient Greek, the language of Homer and Plato, faded after Alexander the Great’s conquests in Iraq, the Levant, and Egypt around 320 BC. A simplified variety, called Koine Greek, emerged in its place, becoming the language of the Gospels and the Byzantine Empire.
In modern times, after long exposure to Ottoman Turkish, some Greek writers created Katharevousa (Purified Greek), an archaic variety aimed to connect with classical roots. Though it once dominated state institutions, universities and literature, Demotic (People’s Greek) triumphed in 1976 and became the official language of the country. Katharevousa was retired to the realm of historical and classical studies.
