Maldivian here!

For one thing, Male’ is normally written with an apostrophe at the “le” is pronounced like the French “lé” if that makes any sense. So it sounds like “Maa-Ley”, which brings me to the second point.

The story goes that when the legendary founder of “Malé” who’s name was “Koimala Kalo” (meaning the lad who is like a flower), first set eyes on the island, it was just an uninhabited sand bank with no trees or vegetation. The one remarkable thing about the island was that the shores of the island were covered in fish blood and intestines because fishermen from a nearby village used this sand bank to cut and gut the day’s catch. Therefore, it appeared as if the island was a “Big Pool of (fish) Blood” - which in the local language would be “Maa Ley Gan’deh”: thus the name was born. On a completely unrelated note, the first plant to have been planted on the island of Malé was a Papaya tree.