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H E R I TA G E
IT'S ALL IN THE NAME WORDS PAUL VASSALLO
A while back, I decided to open a web browser and type in my own surname. A good tenant, a messenger, or a feudal lord; anyone with access to the internet wouldn’t have too much difficulty looking up the origins of my surname, and the same can be said about yours too. Dating back to the 11th century, the Vassallo family is rooted in great antiquity. Several other last names in the Maltese phonebook are marked by similar signs of age and history, many being derived from Medieval Latin or a truncated form of an ancient Spanish or French surname. Others still bear indications of old Arabic origins, an irony that should not be lost in this modern era of tolerance towards our fellow man. The number of Semitic surnames in Malta is only around 50 but, despite this appearing to be a low number, Semitic last names are very prevalent among many of us, outweighing more modern Romance and European surnames. A general rule of thumb when attempting to distinguish Arabic surnames is to search for an ‘-a’ at the end of the surname, bearing a resemblance to Maltese feminine nouns when that is absent in the Arabic form. Thus places such as Raħal Farruġ became the Maltese surname Farrugia, Karwan became Caruana, Salib as Saliba, and Sultan as Sultana. This rule is not set in stone, however, as we can find surnames
which are assumed as having a final ‘-a’ because of its popularity among notaries at the time, such as Aquilina, Barbara, Cassia, Ciappara, Grima, and many others. The 2011 census recorded 19,104 surnames, ranking names such as Borg, Camilleri and Vella among the most popular, to the surprise of no-one. More interestingly, 76 per cent of the population share the same 100 surnames. That’s 307,886 people (at the time of the census), running around with similar surnames that are centuries old. The top 20 surnames accounted for 38.6 per cent, while the three most common foreign last names were Smith, Jones, and Brown, although there are less than 80 people with each name. Some of the oldest documented surnames in Malta are Grech, Calleja, Falzon, Attard, and Lentini. So if you’re signing off with one of these dinosaurs, just letting you know that you’ve got roots to be proud of. According to Maltese linguists, it is also possible to identify a person’s place of origin by their surname, such as Carabotts in Marsaxlokk, an abundance of Abelas from Żejtun, and Mdina playing host to many people bearing the surname Manduca. “Such trends indicate that despite an increasingly mobile population, many surnames still have strong ties to specific