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Dec 15, 2023 · On December 15, 1999, Albanians in Italy were recognized as an ethnic linguistic minority. The legal recognition of the population of Albanian origin residing in Southern Italy is based on framework law no. 482. The status of a linguistic minority enables the teaching of the Albanian language in primary and secondary schools, alongside its official […]
The presence of the Albanian language in the southern Italian region of Calabria may come as a surprise to many, but it is a fascinating aspect of the region’s cultural and linguistic heritage. The roots of Albanian influence in Calabria date back centuries, and the language continues to be spoken by a small but significant population in ...
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The ethnic Albanian (Arbëresh) dialects of Italy bear little resemblance to the standard language or dialects of Albania, as they have been cut off from the main language for around 500 years. Some dialects spoken in Italy are so dissimilar that ethnic Albanians use Italian as a lingua franca. Ethnic Albanians are bilingual.
The Albanian language holds a significant place in Italy due to its historical ties with Albania and the presence of a large Albanian community in the country. The language is spoken in various regions of Italy, primarily in the southern regions where the Albanian population has settled over the years.
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Albanian language, Indo-European language spoken in Albania and by smaller numbers of ethnic Albanians in other parts of the southern Balkans, along the east coast of Italy and in Sicily, in southern Greece, and in Germany, Sweden, the United States, Ukraine, and Belgium. Albanian is the only modern representative of a distinct branch of the Indo-European language family.
The origins of the general name Albanian, which traditionally referred to a restricted area in central Albania, and of the current official name Shqip or Shqipëri, which may well be derived from a term meaning “pronounce clearly, intelligibly,” are still disputed. The name Albanian has been found in records since the time of Ptolemy. In Calabrian Albanian the name is Arbresh, in Modern Greek Arvanítis, and in Turkish Arnaut; the name must have been transmitted early through Greek speech.
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The two principal dialects, Gheg in the north and Tosk in the south, are separated roughly by the Shkumbin River. Gheg and Tosk have been diverging for at least a millennium, and their less extreme forms are mutually intelligible. Gheg has the more marked subvarieties, the most striking of which are the northernmost and eastern types, which include those of the city of Shkodër (Scutari), the northeastern Skopska Crna Gora region of North Macedonia, Kosovo, and the isolated village of Arbanasi (outside Zadar) on the Croatian coast of Dalmatia. Arbanasi, founded in the early 18th century by refugees from the region around the Montenegrin coastal city of Bar, has about 2,000 speakers.
All of the Albanian dialects spoken in Italian and Greek enclaves are of the Tosk variety and seem to be related most closely to the dialect of Çamëria in the extreme south of Albania. These dialects resulted from incompletely understood population movements of the 13th and 15th centuries. The Italian enclaves—nearly 50 scattered villages—probably were founded by emigrants from Turkish rule in Greece. A few isolated outlying dialects of south Tosk origin are spoken in Bulgaria and Turkish Thrace but are of unclear date. The language is still in use in Mandritsa, Bulgaria, at the border near Edirne, and in an offshoot of this village surviving in Mándres, near Kilkís in Greece, that dates from the Balkan Wars. A Tosk enclave near Melitopol in Ukraine appears to be of moderately recent settlement from Bulgaria. The Albanian dialects of Istria, for which a text exists, and of Syrmia (Srem), for which there is none, have become extinct.
The official language, written in a standard roman-style orthography adopted in 1909, was based on the south Gheg dialect of Elbasan from the beginning of the Albanian state until World War II and since has been modelled on Tosk. Albanian speakers in Kosovo and in North Macedonia speak eastern varieties of Gheg but since 1974 have widely adopted a common orthography with Albania. Before 1909 the little literature that was preserved was written in local makeshift Italianate or Hellenizing orthographies or even in Turko-Arabic characters.
A few brief written records are preserved from the 15th century, the first being a baptismal formula from 1462. The scattering of books produced in the 16th and 17th centuries originated largely in the Gheg area (often in Scutarene north Gheg) and reflect Roman Catholic missionary activities. Much of the small stream of literature in the 19th century was produced by exiles. Perhaps the earliest purely literary work of any extent is the 18th-century poetry of Gjul Variboba, of the enclave at San Giorgio, in Calabria. Some literary production continued through the 19th century in the Italian enclaves, but no similar activity is recorded in the Greek areas. All these early historical documents show a language that differs little from the current language. Because these documents from different regions and times exhibit marked dialect peculiarities, however, they often have a value for linguistic study that greatly outweighs their literary merit.
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That Albanian is of clearly Indo-European origin was recognized by the German philologist Franz Bopp in 1854; the details of the main correspondences of Albanian with Indo-European languages were elaborated by another German philologist, Gustav Meyer, in the 1880s and ’90s. Further linguistic refinements were presented by the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen and the Austrian Norbert Jokl. The following etymologies illustrate the relationship of Albanian to Indo-European (an asterisk preceding a word denotes an unattested, hypothetical Indo-European parent word, which is written in a conventionalized orthography): pesë ‘five’ (from *pénkwe); zjarm ‘fire’ (from *gwhermos); natë ‘night’ (from *nokwt-); dhëndër ‘son-in-law’ (from *ǵemə ter-); gjarpër ‘snake’ (from *sérpō˘n-); bjer ‘bring!’ (from *bhere); djeg ‘I burn’ (from *dhegwhō); kam ‘I have’ (from *kapmi); pata ‘I had’ (from *pot-); pjek ‘I roast’ (from *pekwō); and thom, thotë ‘I say, he says’ (from *k’ēmi, *k’ēt…).
The verb system includes many archaic traits, such as the retention of distinct active and middle personal endings (as in Greek) and the change of a stem vowel e in the present to o (from *ē) in the past tense, a feature shared with the Baltic languages. For example, there is mbledh ‘gathers (transitive)’ as well as mblidhet ‘gathers (intransitive), is gathered’ in the present tense and mblodha ‘I gathered’ with an o in the past. Because of the superficial changes in the phonetic shape of the language over 2,000 years and because of the borrowing of words from neighbouring cultures, the continuity of the Indo-European heritage in Albanian has been underrated.
The grammatical categories of Albanian are much like those of other European languages. Nouns show overt gender, number, and three or four cases. An unusual feature is that nouns are further inflected obligatorily with suffixes to show definite or indefinite meaning: e.g., bukë ‘bread,’ buka ‘the bread.’ Adjectives—except numerals and certain quant...
Although Albanian has a host of borrowings from its neighbours, it shows exceedingly few evidences of contact with ancient Greek; one such is the Gheg mokën (Tosk mokër) ‘millstone,’ from the Greek mēkhanē´. Obviously close contacts with the Romans gave many Latin loans—e.g., mik ‘friend’ from Latin amicus and këndoj ‘sing, read’ from cantāre. Furthermore, such loanwords in Albanian attest to the similarities in development of the Latin spoken in the Balkans and of Romanian, a Balkan Romance tongue. For example, Latin palūdem ‘swamp’ became padūlem and then pădure in Romanian and pyll in Albanian, both with a modified meaning, ‘forest.’
Conversely, Romanian also shares some apparently non-Latin indigenous terms with Albanian—e.g., Romanian brad, Albanian bredh ‘fir.’ Thus, these two languages reflect special historical contacts of early date. Early communication with the Goths presumably contributed tirq ‘trousers, breeches’ (from an old compound ‘thigh-breech’), while early Slavic contacts gave gozhdë ‘nail.’ Many Italian, Turkish, Modern Greek, Serbian, and Macedonian-Slav loans can be attributed to cultural contacts of the past 500 years with Venetians, Ottomans, Greeks (to the south), and Slavs (to the east).
The Albanians in Italy ( Italian: Albanesi in Italia; Albanian: Shqiptarët në Itali) refers to the Albanian migrants in Italy and their descendants. They mostly trace their origins to Albania, Greece and since recently to a lesser extent to Kosovo, North Macedonia and other Albanian-speaking territories in the Balkan Peninsula.
The language is spoken by approximately 6 million people in the Balkans, primarily in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. However, due to old communities in Italy and the large Albanian diaspora, the worldwide total of speakers is much higher than in Southern Europe and numbers approximately 7.5 million.
