ICE-Malta

English has been spoken in Malta since 1800, when the islands became a British protectorate prior to their incorporation into the British Empire. Independence was granted in 1964. Today, English and Maltese are co-official languages. Maltese is a Semitic language which has borrowed phonological and morphosyntactic features from Italian and Sicilian; loanwords stem mainly from these Romance languages and English. The majority of the population speak both Maltese and English; code-switching between the two languages is widespread. Italian is also spoken by many.
Population: c.400,000 on the three inhabited islands Malta, Gozo and Comino.

Reading
Sciriha, L. and Vassallo, M. 2006. Living Languages in Malta. Malta: IT Printing.
Vella, A. 1994. Prosodic structure and intonation in Maltese and its influence on Maltese English . Ph.D. Thesis, University of Edinburgh.
Camillieri, A. 1992. The Sociolinguistic Status of English in Malta. Edinburgh Working Papers in Linguistics; n3, pp. 14-24.
Mazzon, Gabriella. 1993. English in Malta. English World-Wide 14, pp. 171-208.
Mazzon, Gabriella. 1992. "A chapter in the worldwide spread of English: Malta", in Rissanen, M., O. Ihalainen, T. Nevalainen, I. Taavitsainen (eds.) History of Englishes - New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 592-601.