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It [Albanian] is the official language of Albania, the co-official language of Kosovo, and the co-official language of many western municipalities of the Republic of Macedonia. Albanian is also spoken widely in some areas in Greece, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia, and in some towns in southern Italy and Sicily.
- Paleo-Balkan Language
Some scholars further propose that innovations exclusively...
- Albanians
The Albanians ( / ælˈbeɪniənz, ɔːl -/ a (w)l-BAY-nee-ənz;...
- Albania
Albania (/ æ l ˈ b eɪ n i ə, ɔː l-/ ⓘ a(w)l-BAY-nee-ə;...
- Paleo-Balkan Language
6 days ago · Albania, country in southern Europe, located in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula on the Strait of Otranto, the southern entrance to the Adriatic Sea. The capital city is Tirana ( Tiranë ). Albanians refer to themselves as shqiptarë —often taken to mean “sons of eagles,” though it may well refer to “those associated with the ...
- Overview
- Dialects
- History
- Classification
- Grammar
- Vocabulary and contacts
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).
Albania (/ æ l ˈ b eɪ n i ə, ɔː l-/ ⓘ a(w)l-BAY-nee-ə; Albanian: Shqipëri or Shqipëria), [a] officially the Republic of Albania (Albanian: Republika e Shqipërisë), [b] is a country in Southeast Europe.
The Albanians ( / ælˈbeɪniənz, ɔːl -/ a (w)l-BAY-nee-ənz; Albanian: Shqiptarët, pronounced [ʃcipˈtaɾət]) are an ethnic group native to the Balkan Peninsula who share a common Albanian ancestry, culture, history and language. [ 66] They are the main ethnic group of Albania and Kosovo, and they also live in the neighboring countries ...
6 days ago · The communist movement drew most of its initial support from Tosks in the south. Albania - Ethnic Groups, Language, Religion: Albania has one of the most homogeneous populations in Europe, with non-Albanians accounting for less than one-tenth of the total population. The largest minorities are Vlachs; Greeks, concentrated mainly in the ...
The Albanian language is one of the oldest and closest surviving relatives to Proto-Indo European. Most importantly, the Albanian experience has been traditionally passed on orally. A standard script using Latin letters (as opposed to Greek or Cyrillic) has been in use since 1908, so any writings before that time are not standardized and ...
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