Maltese is spoken by about 500,000 persons on the Island of Malta. With English, it is an official language of the small country. The language derives from Siculo-Arabic, a mixture of Arabic and indigenous tongues in Sicily, found in the region between the nine and fourteenth centuries. It is considered a Semitic tongue, the only one to use the Latin alphabet. About 20% of the vocabulary has been imported from English. Another 50% comes from Italian and Sicilian.