Ask a Maltese person who they are and the answer rarely stops at a name. It continues with a village, possibly a laqam, sometimes a list of relatives, and occasionally a knowing look that says: 'I already know who you are.' In a country where one in every thirty people is a Borg, and where three quarters of the entire population shares just one hundred surnames, a last name alone is never quite enough to tell the whole story.

But the concentration of Maltese surnames is not just a curiosity. It is the result of a specific, traceable history, of a small island, a limited founding population, centuries of endogamy and catastrophe, and parish priests who turned fluid medieval nicknames into permanent legal identities. Understanding why so few surnames exist tells you something real about where Malta has been. And understanding what those names actually mean, not the folk stories, but the genuine etymology, tells you something real about who you are.

The 76% Figure: What It Actually Means

The figure that circulates in Maltese cultural conversation, that around 75% of the population shares the same 100 surnames, is not a rough estimate. It is a specific finding: 76.02%, calculated by the linguist and onomastics scholar Mario Cassar from National Statistics Office census data. Cassar, who is the author of The Surnames of the Maltese Islands: An Etymological Dictionary (2003), is the single most authoritative researcher on this subject, and his figures have been confirmed by the 2011 Census.

The concentration is extraordinary by any European comparison. Britain's top 100 surnames cover only around 20% of the population, about a quarter of Malta's rate. Italy's top ten surnames cover just 1.7% of the country. Malta's top ten alone cover around 25%. There are approximately 19,000 distinct surnames registered in Malta, but the vast majority are rare, held by one or two families. The working name pool is far smaller.

The top five surnames together account for roughly 14.7% of the population. The top twenty account for about 39%. The top fifty for over 61%. If you are Borg, Camilleri, Vella, Farrugia or Zammit, you share your name with a combined total approaching 60,000 other Maltese people.

The Twenty Most Common Surnames and What They Mean

The top twenty Maltese surnames, in approximate rank order based on the 2005 and 2011 Census data, are: Borg, Camilleri, Vella, Farrugia, Zammit, Galea, Micallef, Grech, Attard, Spiteri, Cassar, Azzopardi, Mifsud, Caruana, Muscat, Agius, Schembri, Abela, Fenech and Pace.

Borg has held the number-one position since at least 1687, when the church conducted a comprehensive census of the diocese known as the Status Animarum. It comes from the Arabic word burj, meaning tower, fortress or fortified place, via the Siculo-Arabic form al-burji. It appears in the earliest surviving Maltese name lists as il-Burgi. One in every thirty people in Malta is a Borg.

Camilleri comes from the Sicilian cammelliere, meaning camel-driver, from the medieval Latin camelarius, a word that entered Sicilian via Arab trade routes through North Africa. Vella is a Sicilian variant of bella, meaning beautiful. Farrugia descends from the Arabic al-farruğ, meaning poulterer or cockerel-keeper, with the Romance -a ending added by Sicilian notaries. The family laqam tradition in parts of southern Malta still plays on this: the Farrugia areas around Vittoriosa and Żurrieq have long been associated with what one study calls 'cockerel symbolism' in local culture.

Zammit is the Arabic personal name Zamit or Zamīt, meaning grave or dignified. Micallef comes from the Maltese word mħallef, meaning judge, from the Arabic root ħ-l-f. Cassar derives from the Arabic al-qaṣṣār, meaning fuller or cloth-bleacher. Mifsud comes from the Arabic mafṣūd or mifṣad, referring to a medical instrument for bleeding, a lancet, suggesting an ancestor who worked as a barber-surgeon or bloodletter. Fenech means rabbit, from the Arabic fanak, which is also where the word fennec (as in the fox) originates.

Grech is simply the Italian Greco, meaning Greek, an ethnonym given to families of Greek origin or who had contact with the Greek-speaking Byzantine world. Attard is a Norman or Germanic personal name, Actard, brought to Malta via Sicily and documented in Malta as early as 1299 in the name Tristanus de Actardo. Azzopardi comes from medieval Greek atsoupas (mercenary soldier), reshaped with the Germanic suffix -ard. Caruana is the Arabic nisba al-karawānī, meaning the one from Kairouan, the great Islamic city in what is now Tunisia. Busuttil, which does not feature in the top twenty but is widely discussed, derives from the Arabic Abū-Sittīn, meaning father of sixty, possibly a militia captain.

A note on three names that are frequently misunderstood. Agius is commonly said to come from the Greek word hagios, meaning holy. Cassar and the linguist Joseph Aquilina both reject this. The most likely derivation is from Arabic Ibn al-ʿAğūz or a form of Ḥağği (one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca), a designation that survived among Christianised Arabic-speaking families. Abela is often described as Arabic in origin or as meaning noble. It is not Arabic: it is a Romance name, a Sicilian variant of bella or possibly related to the Biblical name Abel, or to the Catalan abella (bee). And Galea, whose origin is the most genuinely disputed of the major names, is probably from the Romance galea (galley or warship) rather than from any Arabic root, though the debate continues.

The Spiteri Story: What is True and What is Not

One of the most widely repeated stories about Maltese surnames is that Spiteri was given to children born at the Knights' hospital, the Sacra Infermeria in Valletta, because their fathers were unknown. The Latin root is correct: Spiteri does derive from hospitalarius, via Italian spitaleri, meaning a worker at a hospitium, a lodging-house or hospice. And the semantic connection to the Hospitaller Order is genuine.

But the story of foundling babies cannot be true, for a simple reason: the surname Spiteri is documented in Malta in 1365. The Order of St John did not arrive until 1530, one hundred and sixty-five years later. Spiteri was an occupational name common in medieval Italian and Sicilian before the Knights set foot on the island. What probably happened is that the name expanded significantly during the Hospitaller period, because the word spitaleri described exactly the kind of work the Order promoted. The story fused two separate things: the origin of the word and the growth of the surname. What is true is the root; what is invented is the mechanism.

When Surnames Became Fixed: The 1419 Militia List and the Parish Register

The first surviving Maltese name list dates to 1277, just 38 elite names including Leo Caleya (Calleja), Nicolaus Grecus (Grech), Robertus Yella (an early Vella), and Girardus Machalephus (Micallef). By 1300, surnames in Malta were broadly hereditary, though their spelling was still unstable, the same family might be written differently by different notaries in different years.

The pivotal document is the 1419–20 Militia List, preserved in the Cathedral Archives at Mdina and published by the late historian Godfrey Wettinger in Melita Historica. It lists 1,667 adult males, essentially every man of military age in Malta, and its top surnames are almost identical to those of today: Vella, Zammit, Farrugia, Schembri, Micallef, Borg, Calleja, Cassar, Azzopardi. The names at the top of Malta's lists have not changed in six hundred years.

The spelling of those names was fixed by the Church. The Council of Trent in the mid-16th century required priests to maintain baptismal and marriage registers, but Malta was already ahead of the requirement: Mdina Cathedral's baptismal registers begin in 1539. When clerks wrote the Maltese-Arabic sounds they heard around them using Latin and Sicilian script, they made choices that became permanent. The Arabic ħ became h or was dropped entirely. The Arabic għ became gh, g or disappeared. Sounds that did not exist in Latin script were approximated and then frozen. Modern standardised Maltese orthography was not codified until 1921, by which time four centuries of parish-register spellings had hardened into legal identity.

The 1687 Status Animarum, a diocesan census of the whole island covering 45,288 people and published in a critical edition by historian Stanley Fiorini, shows that eighteen of today's top twenty surnames were already firmly established. The surname map of Malta was essentially drawn before the 18th century began.

Why Malta Ended Up With So Few Surnames: The Three Forces

Three historical forces compressed Malta's surname pool to an extreme degree.

The first is the small founding population. A report from 1241 counted barely 1,100 families in the entire archipelago. Whatever surnames existed were carried by a very small number of family lines. Diversity in surnames requires diversity in population; Malta began with very little of either.

The second is repeated demographic catastrophe. The 1429 Hafsid raid from North Africa took thousands of Maltese into slavery and wiped out many family lines entirely. The 1551 Ottoman raid by Dragut depopulated Gozo almost completely, with virtually the entire island's population enslaved. Plague, corsair raids, and the grinding attrition of the siege years in 1565 repeatedly thinned the population. Each catastrophe eliminated smaller, rarer family names while the larger kin-groups, the Borgs, the Vellls, the Farruġas, survived simply because there were more of them. A study of the surnames in the 1419 and 1480s lists found that of 389 surnames, 220 had completely disappeared by the modern period. Those that survived simply multiplied.

The third force is endogamy, the strong and persistent tendency to marry within one's own village. In a country this small, with this many Borgs and Camilleris, marrying someone with your own surname was not unusual. Marrying someone from the next village was a notable event. Marriage within the same locality, generation after generation, reinforced the dominance of the surnames that were already most common in that locality. In England, the variety of terrain and the size of the country produced different surname pools in different regions; those pools only gradually mixed as people moved. In Malta, the mixing happened within a very small gene pool that had already been narrowed by the events described above.

Your Surname and Your Village

In a country this small and this densely populated, the connection between a surname and a specific place is real and traceable. It does not apply to every name, and urban migration over the past century has blurred many patterns on the main island. But it is still visible in the data, and especially clear in Gozo.

Farrugia is a southern name. It is strongest in Vittoriosa, Cospicua, Fgura, Tarxien, Żurrieq, Mqabba, Qrendi and Siġġiewi, the cluster of harbour towns and agricultural villages in the south of the main island. Abela dominates Żejtun and Għaxaq. Caruana was so concentrated in Żejtun that in the 1687 Status Animarum, 23.2% of all Caruanas in Malta lived there. Bugeja and Carabott cluster in Marsaxlokk. Penza is described by researchers as 'overwhelmingly Luqa.' Borg sits at the top of the ranking in seventeen different localities from Birkirkara to Valletta, which tells you it is a name that belongs everywhere and therefore, in a sense, nowhere specific.

In Gozo the connection is sharper. Vella is the most common Gozitan surname, at around 4.8% of the population. Portelli, the fifth most common name in Gozo, ranks only 32nd in Malta, a surname that reveals itself as distinctively Gozitan. Mintoff is associated with the Għarb, Żebbuġ and Għasri area. Xuereb and Zerafa cluster in Għajnsielem. Buttiġieġ is so concentrated in Qala that, as researcher Kristina Chetcuti has noted, meeting a Gozitan Buttiġieġ means you are almost certainly talking to a Qala family. Six surnames account for a quarter of Gozo's entire population; the top twenty-two make up over 60%.

The Laqam: What Happens When a Surname is not Enough

With so many John Borgs and Joseph Camilleris in every village, Malta developed a workaround that is arguably more revealing than the surname itself: the laqam, a family or individual nickname that pins down which specific Borg or Camilleri you are. The word comes from the Arabic laqab, meaning epithet, honorific or title, one of the classical elements of traditional Arabic personal naming alongside the ism (given name) and the kunyah (parental name). It arrived with the Arab population that settled Malta from the 9th century and has never left.

Laqmijiet come in two forms. The individual laqam uses the definite article il- or l-: il-Fartas (the bald one), l-Għannej (the singer), il-Perit (the architect). The family laqam uses the prepositional ta'/tal-/tas-: tal-Flieles (of the chicks), tal-Ħobż (of the bread, for a baker family), tal-Ingliż (of the Englishman, for a family with a known English ancestor). Whole villages carry collective laqmijiet: Ħamrun is tas-Sikkina (of the knife, for its coal-cutters); Żejtun is Ta' Saqajhom Ċatta (the flat-footed, from a legend connected to St Paul).

The tradition has been documented academically since Ġużè Cassar Pullicino's study of Maltese nicknames in the journal Scientia in 1956, and more recently in Luke Micallef's 2018 study of laqmijiet in Rabat. It is declining quietly in urban suburbs but very much alive in Rabat, Żebbuġ, Qormi and most of Gozo. The website laqam.mt, started by Gozitan designer Jean Claude Vancell, sells hand-painted family-nickname artworks, which suggests the appetite for this layer of identity is not going away.

Min Int? The Question Behind the Question

Ask an older Gozitan who you are, and min int? rarely means just 'what is your name?' It means: whose family, which village, and, if necessary, which laqam. It is the operating question of Maltese social identity, and it functions as it does precisely because of everything described above: because surnames are so shared, because villages are so specific, and because the family networks on a small, densely populated island are long, interconnected and well remembered.

This is not a weakness of the system. It is the system. A surname in Malta has always been the beginning of an answer rather than the end of one.

The Surnames that travelled

Malta's largest diaspora is in Australia, where the 2021 Census counted nearly 200,000 people of Maltese descent. Research by Mario Cassar, comparing Australian phone-directory data with the Maltese census, found that the same names dominate both communities: seventeen of Malta's top twenty surnames appear in Australia's top twenty Maltese names, in roughly the same order.

What changes is usually the pronunciation, not the spelling. Buttiġieġ becomes 'butt-ee-gig.' Borg loses its dot and is read like the Swedish name. Grech is pronounced 'Gretch.' Full anglicisation, the kind that turned Schmidt into Smith across generations, is conspicuously rare in the Maltese-Australian community. The surname Farrugia stayed Farrugia in Melbourne. Borg stayed Borg in Toronto. Cassar stayed Cassar in Detroit. Maltese surnames, it turns out, are as stubborn as the people who carry them.

What Your Surname Really Tells You

A Maltese surname is less a certificate of ethnic ancestry than a chronological fossil. A Siculo-Arabic name like Borg or Farrugia proves your family was in the Arabic-speaking orbit of medieval Sicily by the 12th or 13th century, but not that your DNA is Arab, because by the time surnames were fixed, notaries were bestowing them on descendants of Normans, Sicilians, converted Muslims, Jews and freed slaves alike. A Sicilian name like Camilleri places your line in the Sicilian kinship network of the late medieval period. A Norman name like Attard, documented in 1299, suggests an unusually old Christian lineage, one that survived every occupation since the Aragonese period. An occupational name like Cassar or Mifsud reflects what someone's ancestor did for a living, not where they were from.

A village concentration hints at where your 16th-century forebears were baptised. It does not tell you where your grandchildren will live.

What the scholarship really shows, from Wettinger's 1419 Militia List, to Cassar's etymological dictionary, to Fiorini's 1687 census, is remarkable continuity. Most of the surnames Maltese people carry today were being written into parish registers four centuries ago and spoken in the streets of Mdina and Birgu six centuries ago. Borg, Vella, Camilleri, Farrugia and Zammit were the top names in 1419. They are still the top names today. In a country this small, a shared name is not just a genealogical accident. It is the common inheritance.

About Matthew Gollcher

Hi I'm Matthew, a content writer and Business & Marketing student at the University of Malta. I'm passionate about creating meaningful content and exploring AI's creative possibilities. When I'm not working or studying, I enjoy the gym, time with friends, watching series, and playing guitar. I'm always eager to learn and grow both personally and professionally.