Beginning of organised work: 1810
Date of formation of Bible Society: 1958
Founding Member in 1970 of the Catholic Bible Federation
Date of Associate Membership in UBS: 1984
The mission of the Malta Bible Society is to provide the Holy Scriptures to every man, woman and child in a language and form each can readily understand, and at a price each can easily afford.
This purpose, undertaken without doctrinal note or comment, and without profit, is a cause which all Christians and all churches are urged to support.
The Bible Society is a member of the United Bible Societies (UBS) and of the Catholic Biblical Federation (CBF), two world partnerships of Bible Societies throughout the world cooperating to make Scriptures available to people everywhere in their own language.
The Bible Society seeks to carry out its mission in different ways and with different programmes aimed at all categories of the population.
The Malta Bible Society launched the 5th Edition of Bible in Maltese online and will be publishing a printed copy during 2020.
About the Maltese Language
Maltese is the national language of Malta and is spoken by over 400,000 people. There are several Maltese dialects including Standard Maltese, Port Maltese, Rural West Maltese, Rural East Maltese, Rural Central Maltese, Zurrieq and Gozo. According to Ethnologue Maltese is believed to have sprung from an extinct variety of Arabic called descended Siculo-Arabic from Sicily .
Maltese also has strong influence from Italian and Sicilian. Siculo-Arabic almost one-third of the Maltese language. Half of the vocabulary is gotten from Italian and Sicilian while English words make up to 20% of the vocabulary. Maltese is written in the Latin script. The Maltese Bible has a long version going way back to around 1814.