Albanian

Albanian (also known as Shqip), forms a branch of the Indo-European language ifamily all by itself. It is spoken by 7.3 million people in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Turkey, and by immigrant communities world-wide. Albanian was finally proven to be an Indo-European language only in 1854.

Although there is no consensus among scholars about its origin, it is generally believed that the ancestors of Albanian split from Proto-Indo-European about 4,000 years ago.

Where did the Albanian language and Albanians come from?

Status

• Standard Albanian (based on the Tosk dialect) is the national language of Albania where it is spoken by 2.9 million people (Ethnologue).
• Albanian (based on the Gheg dialect) is the de facto provincial language of Kosovo (Ethnologue).

Dialects

There are two principal dialects of Albanian that are mutually unintelligible due to significant linguistic differences between the two. The Shkumbin River in Albania divides the country into two dialect areas.

• Tosk (toskërishtja) is spoken by around 3 million people south of the Shkumbin River. It is also spoken in Italy, Greece and in small communities of Albanian immigrants in Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, and the United States (Ethnologue). Standard Albanian is based on the Tosk dialect. Tosk has three varieties: Arbereshe spoken in Italy; Arvanitika spoken in Greece, and Tosk spoken in Albania.
• Gheg (gegërishtja) is spoken by 2.8 million people north of the Shkumbin River. It is also spoken in Serbia and Montenegro and in the Republic of North Macedonia (Ethnologue).

Structure

Sound system

Tosk dialects have 7 vowel and 29 consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. Gheg dialects have between 14 and 19 vowel phonemes.

Vowels

Tosk has seven vowel phonemes which are given below. Gheg differentiates between short and long and between oral and nasal varieties of these vowels. The vowel phonemes of Tosk are given below (based on Wikipedia).

• /y/ = ue in statue
• /ə/ = a in about
• /ɔ/ =o in bog

Consonants

Tosk has a rich system of consonants. They are presented in the table below (based on Wikipedia).

• /θ/ = th in thin
• /ð/ = th in that
• /ʃ/ = sh in shop
• /ʒ/ = s in treasure
• /tʃ/ = ch in chap
• /dʒ/ = j in jam
• /c/ = no equivalent in English
• /ɟ/ = no equivalent in English
• /ɲ/ = first n in canyon
• /ɬ/ = ll in bull
• /r/ = rr in Spanish perro ‘dog’
• /ɾ/ = r in Spanish pero ‘but’

Stress

Stress normally falls on the last syllable of the stem.

Grammar

The grammar of Albanian is quite complex. It shares some features with the grammars of other Balkan languages, such as Romanian and Greek.

Nouns, adjectives, articles, and pronouns

Albanian nouns are marked for the following grammatical categories:

• There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.
• Tehre are two two numbers: singular and plural.
• There are 4 declensions.
• There are 6 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative. The vocative case occurs in only a few nouns.
• Definite articles are attached to the end of nouns (as in Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Romanian), e.g., zog ‘bird’, zogu ‘the bird’, shtëpi ‘house’, shtëpia ‘the house’.
• Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify and agree with it in gender, number and case.
• Adjectives require a particle preceding them that agrees with the noun they modify, e.g., in një burrë i madh ‘a big man’, the noun burrë ‘man’ is modified by madh ‘big’ which is preceded by i which agrees with burrë ‘man’.

Verbs

The verb system of Albanian is extremely complex due to the large number of moods, each of which has several tenses. Verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. Verbs have the following grammatical categories:

• three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd
• two numbers: singular, plural
• six moods: indicative, subjunctive, admirative, conditional, optative, imperative
• Each mood has several tenses, e.g., Indicative – 8; subjunctive – 4, admirative – 4, conditional – 2, optative – 2, imperative – 1.
• Verbs have two forms, e.g., laj/ ‘I wash’, and lahem ‘I am washed’, or ‘I wash myself”.
• An unusual feature of the verb phrase is that when a definite noun is the direct object of the sentence, a pronoun in the objective case that repeats this information is inserted into the verb phrase; e.g., i-a dhash‘ librin atij is literally ‘him it I gave the book to him’.

Word order

The normal word order in Albanian sentences is Subject-Verb-Object.

Vocabulary

Albanian has borrowed a great number of words from its neighbors. As a result of close contact with the Romans, Albanian has many Latin loanwords such as mik ‘friend,’ from Latin amicus. Another source of borrowed vocabulary are Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian. The rise of the Ottoman Empire also brought many Turkish words into the language.

Below is a list of common phrases and words in Albanian Tosk.

Basic Albanian phrases

Below are the numerals 1-10 in Albanian Tosk.

Writing

The oldest surviving document in Albanian was written in 1462 in the Gheg dialect. The oldest known Albanian printed book was a missal written by a Catholic cleric in 1555. The first Albanian school is believed to have been opened by Franciscans in 1638. The first Latin-Albanian dictionary was written in 1635.

The modern Albanian alphabet is based on an extended Latin alphabet which was introduced in 1908. It consists of 36 letters some of which were adapted to represent Albanian sounds. Before that, Albanian was written using the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Turkish version of the Arabic alphabet. The table below lists the letters of the modern Albanian alphabet and their approximate pronunciation in English.

• ç = ch in chat
• dh = th in these
• gj = g in geese
• j = y in yam
• ll = ll in bull
• nj = first n in canyon
• r = Spanish r in pero ‘but’
• rr = Spanish rr in perro ‘dog’
• th = th in thin
• x = ds in cads
• xh = j in joy
• zh = s in vision

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Albanian Tosk.

Difficulty

Language Difficulty

How difficult is it to learn Albanian?
Albanian is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English.

Basic resources

Albanian Language (Wikipedia)

Albanian (Ethnologue)

OLAC Resources in and about the Albanian language