Albanian language

Albanian is a language spoken by over 6 million people primarily in Albania, but also in several other states in the Balkans as well as by emigrant groups in Italy and Turkey. The language makes up its own branch of the Indo-European languages.

History

The oldest known Albanian printed book, Meshari [1] or missal, was written by Gjon Buzuku, a Catholic cleric, in 1555. The first Albanian school is believed to have been opened by Franciscans in 1638 in Pdhanë.

Classification

Albanian was proved to be an Indo-European language in the 1850s. The Albanian language is on its own branch of the Indo-European language family. Some hypothesize that Albanian may be the survival of an Illyrian language once spoken in the northwestern Balkans. Others suggest Albanian may be related more to the ancient Dacian language once spoken in Moesia and Dacia. It is unclear whether Dacian and Illyrian were on different branches of the Indo-European family, but most scholars consider that they were.

The two distinct Albanian dialects, Tosk and Gheg, spoken today are part of a wider language group. Languages sharing a common origin with Tosk are spoken in Italian and Greek enclaves and appear to be related most closely to the dialect of Çamëria in the extreme south of Albania. Due to the heavy influence of the Italian and Greek languages with which they have come into contact, they have diverged significantly from standard Tosk Albanian and are widely regarded as separate languages within the same language family.

• Gheg subgroup:
  • Gheg dialect
• Tosk subgroup:
  • Tosk dialect
  • Arbëreshë language
  • Arvanitic language

Albanology

Some eminent scholars in the field of Albanian language have been Johann Georg von Hahn, Franz Bopp, Gustav Meyer, Norbert Jokl, Eqrem Çabej, Stuart Edward Mann, Carlo Tagliavini, Wacław Cimochowski, Eric Pratt Hamp, Agnija Desnickaja and Gjovalin Shkurtaj who is probably the most distinguished socio-linguist in Albania today. He is the head of the Department of Linguistics at Tirana University.

Geographic distribution

Dialects

There are two principal dialects, Tosk and Gheg, which are mutually intelligible, except in their more extreme forms. The geographical border of the two dialects has traditionally been the Shkumbini River in Albania, with Gheg being spoken north of the river, and Tosk south of the river. The two dialects have phonological as well as lexicological differences.

Tosk is the dialect spoken by most members of the large Albanian immigrant communities that have recently arrived in these two countries, and in smaller Albanian communities in Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, and United States.

Gheg (or Geg) is spoken in northern Albania and by the Albanians of Serbia and Montenegro (Southern Montenegro and Southern Serbia), the UN protectorate of Kosovo, as well as those of the Republic of Macedonia.

Since after World War II there have been efforts to create a Standard or Literary Albanian that borrows most heavily from the Tosk dialect (at the behest of the dictator Enver Hoxha, himself a Tosk speaker). The Congress on the Orthography of Albanian, held in 1972 with the additional participation of delegates from the Yugoslav territories of Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro and Calabria (Italy), established a unified literary language. The resulting orthographic rules were codified in such tomes as Drejtshkrimi i gjuhës shqipe (1973) [The Orthography of the Albanian Language] and Fjalori drejtshkrimor i gjuhës shqipe (1976) [The Orthographic Dictionary of the Albanian Language.]

Official status

Albanian, in the Tosk dialect, is the official language of Albania. Albanian is also one of the official languages of Kosovo, and of the Republic of Macedonia.

Sounds

Albanian has seven vowels: /i ɛ a ə ɔ y u/ and 29 phonemic consonants.

Vowels

Consonants

The following is a table of the Albanian phonemic consonants. Orthography and pronunciation are shown later.

Notes:

• The affricates are pronounced as one sound (a stop and a fricative at the same point).
• The palatal stops q and gj are completely unknown to English, so the pronunciation guide is approximate. Among major languages, palatal stops can be found, for example, in Hungarian (where these sounds are spelt ty and gy respectively) or in Czech (respectively t' and d').
• The palatal nasal nj corresponds to the sound of the Spanish ñ or the French or Italian digraph gn (as in gnocchi). It is pronounced as one sound, not a nasal plus a glide.
• The ll sound is a velarized lateral, close to English "dark L".
• The contrast between flapped r and trilled rr is the same as in Spanish. English does not have any of the two sounds phonemically (but tt in butter is pronounced as a flap r in most American dialects).
• (1) The letter ç can be spelt ch on American English keyboards, both due to its English sound, but more importantly, due to analogy with Albanian xh, sh, zh. (Usually, however, it's spelt simply c, which may cause confusion; however, meanings are usually understood).

Grammar

These are the main grammatical features of Albanian:

• Constituent Order is Subject Verb Object.
• There are two genders, masculine and feminine, with traces of an old neuter, restricted to some few words.
• There are five morphological cases: nominative (in Alb. emërore) , accusative (kallëzore), genitive (gjinore), dative (dhanore) and ablative (rrjedhore). Some also include vocative. They apply both to definite and indefinite nouns, and there is also numerous cases of synchretism. The following is the declension of the masculine noun mal ("mountain"):

• Definiteness is expressed by a system of noun suffixes, which vary with gender and case. For example in singular nominative, masculine nouns add -i or -u: mal ("mountain") / mali ("the mountain"); zog ("bird") / zogu ("the bird"). Feminine nouns add -(j)a: shtëpi ("house") / shtëpia ("the house"); lule ("flower") / lulja ("the flower") . Neuter nouns take -t.
• Negation is expressed by the particles nuk or s' in front of the verb, as in Goni nuk flet anglisht "Goni doesn't speak English". In imperative sentences, the particle mos is used.

Vocabulary

Albanian split from the Proto-Indo-European language about 4000 years ago and most of the basic words are derived directly from it. Some of these words have cognates (of non-Latin origin) in Romanian and there is a theory that the language spoken by the Dacians before the Romanization was a language related to proto-Albanian.

It is not certain whether ancient Greek influenced the early Albanian language (there are a few somewhat uncertain examples of possible loanwords). With the expansion of the Roman Empire, Latin, more specifically, the Balkan Latin (which was the ancestor of Romanian and other Balkan Romance languages), would exert a great influence on Albanian. Examples of words borrowed from Latin: qytet < civitas (city), qiell < caelum (sky), mik < amicus (friend).

After the Slavs arrived in the Balkans, another source of Albanian vocabulary were the Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian. As in all other Balkan languages, the rise of the Ottoman Empire meant an influx of Turkish words; this also entailed the borrowing of Persian and Arabic words through Turkish. Some loanwords from Modern Greek also exist.

Writing system

The Albanian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the letters ë, ç, and nine digraphs to account for certain sounds in pronunciations. Until 1908, when the Latin alphabet was introduced in Albanian, the Greek alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, and the Ottoman Turkish version of the Arabic alphabet had been used to write Albanian.

Examples

Note: All the sounds above are in the Ogg Vorbis format.

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Albanian language

• Arvanitika
• List of common phrases in various languages
• Tongue-twisters
• Language families and languages
• Numbers in various languages

External links

Albanian language edition of Wikipedia

• English - Albanian Dictionary
• Albanian - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition.
• An overview of the Albanian language and culture
• Albanian phrase guide
• Ethnologue report on Albanian
• List of free online resources for learners
• List of online Albanian-related resources
• Albanian World Learn Albanian here

Samples of Albanian dialects and related languages:

• Albanian (Gheg)
• Albanian (Tosk)
• Arbëreshë (Italy)
• Arbëríshte/Arvanitic (Greece)