For many years it has been held that the Maltese National Language is a Semitic off-shoot of Phoenician and therefore of Punic origin. However recent theories suggest that this lingua franca is a mixture of classical Arabic and Aramaic surviving the Siculo – when the Arabic-speaking Aghlabid armies occupied Sicily and Malta. With the later addition of neo-Latin vocabulary acquired from a line of successive rulers, it wasn’t long before Maltese developed into a separate language.