The oldest known Maltese-language literary text is a poem called Il-Kantilena, which dates all the way back to the 15th century! However, the poem was discovered in 1966 by historians Godfrey Wettinger and Mikiel Fsadni.

The text is attributed to Malta’s first known philosopher, Pietru Caxaro, and was recorded in Caxaro’s nephew’s notarial register. Due to the document’s age, it suffered some inevitable damage. Fortunately, it was preserved and restored in 2013 by Malta’s Notarial Archives.

The text was written in Old Maltese. At the time, Maltese was not yet influenced by the Romance languages, such as Italian, so it had many Semitic elements. This is reflected in the text as very few words stemming from Italian were present amongst the Arabic vocabulary.

Additionally, Maltese spelling was not standardised yet, so most words look quite different from what modern Maltese speakers are used to - with some letters not even existing yet! In fact, there were different versions of the Maltese alphabet before its final iteration in 1924.

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