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]