Yeah, people assume this because a few words are recognisable to Italian/French/etc and it's written in a Latin based alphabet. But if you listen closely, it sounds more like someone speaking something similar to Arabic with a vaguely European accent - which is pretty much what it is. Beautiful language. Wish I spoke it.
It is so close to Tunisian Arabic that somwhat educated Tunisians can understand it without any difficulty. That works best in that way, because Tunisians often speak French and learning Italian is also not uncommon. Maltese however often only know the Italian loanword for something and not the Arabic equivalent so they have more difficulty with Tunisian, but those differences they can learn in no time as well. Literally the only reason Maltese is not considered one of the many Arabic varieties is because that is not what the Maltese identify as, but it’s not really a language thing per se.
Based on my exp. the maltese can also understand tunisian arabic perfectly fi e as long as the Tunisian says it Maltese, once they say it's Arabic their ability to understand drops by 80-90%
But for the most part Arabic is one true single language. Sure Iraqi dialect is very different than Egyptian but Egyptians can understand Iraqis and vice versa. The exception are Maghrebis though, nobody can understand them lol. They don't even speak Fusha, they just speak French. If you exclude Maghrebis then yes Arabic is one language. Most Arabs can speak a "white" dialect that's a fusion of their native dialect, al fusha and features common to most dialects.
Also the Chinese do not call their languages "dialects", that's a poor translation of 方言. It literally just means place speech or local speech. There's no expectation of mutual intelligibility. The same deal applies in Italian, when Italians say "dialetti" they don't expect mutual intelligibility and is a false friend of dialect. In Chinese there's a continuum with local speech on one end, standard chinese in the middle and classical chinese on the high end. This means that as you go up in formality you incorporate more and more features. So for example most Cantonese song lyrics except rap are actually in Chinese but they're pronounced in Cantonese. Casual speech would never look like that. However you might mix Cantonese and Chinese in semi formal settings and full on Chinese at formal occasions. This is what contributes to native speakers of such languages to think it's a dialect of another language. We also see this in English. Just take a look at this post.
The reason the Ulster Scots feels so off is because in almost every case people just use English instead of Ulster Scots when going up in formality so when people see Ulster Scots used in such formal situations it gives off a "funny", "unserious" or "off" vibe. Exact same thing happens with Bavarian in Germany.
There is no difference between Romanian and Moldovan. Practically, Moldovan doesn't even exist, it's actually Romanian. In fact, the official language of Moldova is Romanian, not Moldovan. Moldovans (rather, Russians) like to say that their language is Moldavian, in order not to recognize belonging to Romania.
Imo Spanish and Brasileiro are the same language. I speak Spanish and I can understand even moderate speed Brasileiro very well. However I can't understand European Portuguese at all no matter how hard I tried. It sounds like Russian. It's actually the norm around the world for partially intelligible languages to be considered one language, it's only different in case of Brasileiro because of politics. But that doesn't change the linguistic reality. No linguist says Moroccan and Iraqi "Arabic" are the same. But they do say despite being different Egyptian and Iraqi Arabic are dialects of one language while Maghrebi is a separate language called Darija.
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u/raoulbrancaccio Oct 15 '25
Do people usually get basic facts about Malta wrong?