The article posted here about Sicilian is very interesting and informative but: I read another that explained that the language that developed during the Arab domination has been termed Siculo-Arabic. Further that this language was the dominant one in Calabria Sicily and Malta at the time. Maltese is supposed to be the last surviving example of this language. The Maltese vocabulary is roughly 51% latin derived. The form of most of those words is Sicilian: what would be a letter O on the end of the Italian word is a U in Sicilian and Maltese, the plural of a word that would end in E in Italian, ends in I in Maltese following the Sicilian form etc.
What I haven't been able to get a good explanation about is this: why did this language survive intact in Malta and not evolve as it did in Sicily and Calabria? The Arabs were defeated in Malta at around the same time and both islands were dominated by essentially most of the same foreign powers at the same times.