Cottonera dialect

The vowel i after għ remains an /i/ as in the English fleece, instead of diphthongizing to /ai/ as in the English price.

This dialectal change does not occur with the words għid (easter), erbgħin (forty), sebgħin (seventy), and disgħin (ninety).

The local poet from Senglea, Dwardu Cachia (1858-1907), formed part of the Xirka Xemija in 1882, an organization which formulated one of the first standardized versions of written Maltese.[3] Moreover, Cachia wrote a poem about this very alphabet, in which he made use of the 4-line rhyme. Coincidentally, the ABCB rhyme of the second stanza only works if read in his Cottonera dialect.[4]

The vowel u after għ remains an /u:/ as in the English goose, instead of diphthongizing to /au/ as in the English mouth.

Although in contemporary Maltese (21st Century), the combination għe sometimes produces an /a/ vowel, the Cottonera dialect has widely kept the /e~i/ realization comparable to Standard Maltese.

In Cottonera, most notably among the eldest demographic of Senglea, the consonant q is still pronounced as a voiceless uvular plosive /q/, as its counterpart in Classical Arabic. This sound survived in Modern Maltese only through the Cottonera dialect, instead of being replaced with the Standard glottal stop /ʔ/. However, it is important to note that it is severely in decline.[5][6][7]