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Albanian (shqip or gjuha shqipe , meaning Albanian language) is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people,[3] primarily in Albania, Kosovo, the Republic of Macedonia, and Greece, but also in other areas of Southeastern Europe in which there is an Albanian population, including Montenegro and the Preševo Valley of Serbia. Centuries-old communities speaking Albanian-based dialects can be found scattered in Greece, southern Italy,[4] Sicily, and Ukraine.[5] As a result of a modern diaspora, there are also Albanian speakers elsewhere in those countries as well as in other parts of the world, including Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Turkey.
The earliest written document that mentions the Albanian language is a late-13th-century crime report from Dubrovnik. The first audio recording of Albanian was made by Norbert Jokl on 4 April 1914 in Vienna.[6]
The first written mention of the Albanian language was on 14 July 1285 in Dubrovnik, when a certain Matthew, witness of a crime, stated "I heard a voice shouting on the mountainside in the Albanian tongue" (Latin: Audivi unam vocem, clamantem in monte in lingua albanesca).[7][8]
The Albanian language is an Indo-European language in a branch by itself, sharing its branch with no other extant language. The other extant Indo-European languages in a branch by themselves are Armenian and, in some classifications, Greek. Though sharing lexical isoglosses with Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Germanic, the vocabulary of Albanian is quite distinct. Once hastily grouped with Germanic and Balto-Slavic based on the merger of PIE *ǒ and *ǎ into *ǎ in a supposed "northern group",[9] Albanian has been proven to be distinct from these two because this vowel shift is only part of a larger push chain that affected all long vowels.[10] Albanian does share two features with Balto-Slavic languages: a lengthening of syllabic consonants before voiced obstruents and a distinct treatment of long syllables ending in a sonorant.[11] Conservative features of Albanian include the retention of the distinction between active and middle voice, present tense, and aorist.
Albanian is considered to have evolved from an ancient Paleo-Balkan language, usually taken to be either Illyrian or Thracian, but this is disputed. (See also Thraco-Illyrian and Messapian language.)
The earliest loanwords attested in Albanian come from Doric Greek, [12] whereas the strongest influence came from Latin. The period during which Proto-Albanian and Latin interacted was protracted and drawn out roughly from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD.[13] This is borne out into roughly three layers of borrowings, the largest number belonging to the second layer. The first, with the fewest borrowings, was a time of less important interaction. The final period, probably preceding the Slavic or Germanic invasions, also has a notably smaller number of borrowings. Each layer is characterized by a different treatment of most vowels, the first layer having several that follow the evolution of Early Proto-Albanian into Albanian; later layers reflect vowel changes endemic to Late Latin and presumably Proto-Romance. Other formative changes include the syncretism of several noun case endings, especially in the plural, as well as a large-scale palatalization.
A brief period followed, between the 7th and 9th centuries AD, that was marked by heavy borrowings from Southern Slavic, some of which predate the "o-a" shift common to the modern forms of this language group. Starting in the latter 9th century AD, there was a period characterized by protracted contact with the Proto-Romanians, or Vlachs, though lexical borrowing seems to have been mostly one sided—from Albanian into Romanian. Such borrowing indicates that the Romanians migrated from an area where the majority was Slavic (i.e. Middle Bulgarian) to an area with a majority of Albanian speakers (i.e. Dardania, where Vlachs are recorded in the 10th century AD). Their movement is probably related to the expansion of the Bulgarian Empire into Albania around that time.
According to the central hypothesis of a project undertaken by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, Old Albanian had a significant influence on the development of many Balkan languages. Intensive research now aims to confirm this theory. Albanian is being researched using all available texts before a comparison with other Balkan languages is carried out. The outcome of this work will include the compilation of a lexicon providing an overview of all Old Albanian verbs.[14]
After the Slavs arrived in the Balkans, the Slavic languages became an additional source of loanwords. The rise of the Ottoman Empire meant an influx of Turkish words; this also entailed the borrowing of Persian and Arabic words through Turkish. Many Albanian names (such as Enver Hoxha) are of Turkish origin. Some loanwords from Modern Greek also exist especially in the south of Albania. A lot of the borrowed words have been re-substituted from Albanian rooted words or modern Latinized (international) words.
The earliest accepted document in the Albanian language is from the 15th century AD. It is assumed that Greek and 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).
Some Gothic loanwords were borrowed through Late Latin, while others came from the Ostrogothic expansion into parts of Praevalitana around Nakšić and the Gulf of Kotor in Montenegro.
There are some 30 Ancient Greek loanwords in Albanian.[83] Many of these reflect a dialect which voiced its aspirants, as did the Macedonian dialect. Other loanwords are Doric; these words mainly refer to commodity items and trade goods and probably came through trade with a now-extinct intermediary.[12]
Phonologically Albanian is not so conservative. Like many IE stocks it has merged the two series of voiced stops (e.g. both *d and *dʰ became d). In addition the voiced stops tend to disappear in between vowels. There is almost complete loss of final syllables and very widespread loss of other unstressed syllables (e.g. mik, "friend" from Lat. amicus). PIE *o appears as a (also as e if a high front vowel i follows), while *ē and *ā become o, and PIE *ō appears as e. The palatals, velars, and labiovelars all remain distinct before front vowels, a conservation found otherwise in Luvian and related Anatolian languages. Thus PIE *ḱ, *k, and *kʷ become th, q, and s, respectively (before back vowels *ḱ becomes th, while *k and *kʷ merge as k). Another remarkable retention is the preservation of initial *h4 as Alb. h (all other laryngeals disappear completely).[64]
Albanian is compared to other Indo-European languages below, but note that Albanian has exhibited some notable instances of semantic drift (such as motër meaning "sister" rather than "mother" or the Latin loans gjelbër and verdhë having become switched in meaning).
The demonstrative pronoun ko is ancestral to Albanian ky/kjo and English he.
According to the central hypothesis of a project undertaken by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, Old Albanian had a significant influence on the development of many Balkan languages. Intensive research now aims to confirm this theory. This little-known language is being researched using all available texts before a comparison with other Balkan languages is carried out. The outcome of this work will include the compilation of a lexicon providing an overview of all Old Albanian verbs.[63]
Albanian is often seen as the descendant of Illyrian,[61] although this hypothesis has been challenged by some linguists, who maintain that it derives from Dacian or Thracian.[62] (Illyrian, Dacian, and Thracian, however, may have formed a subgroup or a Sprachbund; see Thraco-Illyrian).
Albanian was formerly compared by some Indo-Europeanists with Balto-Slavic and Germanic,[56] both of which share a number of isoglosses with Albanian. Moreover, Albanian has undergone a vowel shift in which stressed, long o has fallen to a, much like in the former and opposite the latter. Likewise, Albanian has taken the old relative jos and innovatively used it exclusively to qualify adjectives, much in the way Balto-Slavic has used this word to provide the definite ending of adjectives. Other linguists link Albanian with Greek and Armenian, while placing Germanic and Balto-Slavic in another branch of Indo-European.[57][58][59] Nakhleh, Ringe, and Warnow argued that Albanian can be placed at a variety of points within the Indo-European tree with equally good fit; determining its correct placement is hampered by the loss of much of its former diagnostic inflectional morphology and vocabulary.[60]
Albanian was demonstrated to be an Indo-European language in 1854 by the philologist Franz Bopp. The Albanian language constitutes its own branch of the Indo-European language family.[55]
In 1635, Frang Bardhi (1606–1643) published in Rome his Dictionarum latinum-epiroticum, the first known Latin-Albanian dictionary. Other scholars who studied the language during the 17th century include Andrea Bogdani (1600–1685), author of the first Latin-Albanian grammar book, Nilo Katalanos (1637–1694) and others.[54]
Dr. Robert Elsie, a specialist in Albanian studies, considers that "The Todericiu/Polena Romanian translation of the non-Latin lines, although it may offer some clues if the text is indeed Albanian, is fanciful and based, among other things, on a false reading of the manuscript, including the exclusion of a whole line."[53]
"A star has fallen in a place in the woods, distinguish the star, distinguish it. Distinguish the star from the others, they are ours, they are. Do you see where the great voice has resounded? Stand beside it That thunder. It did not fall. It did not fall for you, the one which would do it. ... Like the ears, you should not believe ... that the moon fell when ... Try to encompass that which spurts far ... Call the light when the moon falls and no longer exists ..."
In 1967 two scholars claimed to have found a brief text in Albanian inserted into the Bellifortis text, a book written in Latin dating to 1402–1405.[52]
The first book in Albanian is the Meshari ("The Missal"), written by Gjon Buzuku between 20 March 1554 and 5 January 1555. The book was written in the Gheg dialect in the Latin script with some Slavic letters adapted for Albanian vowels. The book was discovered in 1740 by Gjon Nikollë Kazazi, the Albanian archbishop of Skopje. It contains the liturgies of the main holidays. There are also texts of prayers and rituals and catechetical texts. The grammar and the vocabulary are more archaic than those in the Gheg texts from the 17th century. The 188 pages of the book comprise about 154,000 words with a total vocabulary of c. 1,500 different words. The text is archaic yet easily interpreted because it is mainly a translation of known texts, in particular portions of the Bible. The book also contains passages from the Psalms, the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Jeremiah, the Letters to the Corinthians, and many illustrations. The uniformity of spelling seems to indicate an earlier tradition of writing. The only known copy of the Meshari is held by the Apostolic Library.[51] In 1968 the book was published with transliterations and comments by linguists.
The earliest known texts in Albanian:
The Albanian language has been written using many different alphabets since the earliest records from the 15th century. The history of Albanian language orthography is closely related to the cultural orientation and knowledge of certain foreign languages among Albanian writers.[34] The earliest written Albanian records come from the Gheg area in makeshift spellings based on Italian or Greek and sometimes in Arabic characters. Originally, the Tosk dialect was written in the Greek alphabet and the Gheg dialect was written in the Latin script. Both dialects had also been written in the Ottoman Turkish version of the Arabic script, Cyrillic, and some local alphabets. More specifically, the writers from Northern Albania and under the influence of the Catholic Church used Latin letters, those in southern Albania and under the influence of the Greek Orthodox church used Greek letters, while others throughout Albania and under the influence of Islam used Arabic letters. There were initial attempts to create an original Albanian alphabet during the 1750–1850 period. These attempts intensified after the League of Prizren and culminated with the Congress of Monastir held by Albanian intellectuals from 14 to 22 November 1908, in Monastir (present day Bitola), which decided the alphabet and standardized spelling for standard Albanian down to the present. The alphabet is the Latin alphabet with the addition of the letters ë, ç, and nine digraphs.
In imperative sentences, the particle mos is used:
However, the verb can optionally occur in sentence-initial position, especially with verbs in the non-active form (forma joveprore):
In Albanian, the constituent order is subject–verb–object, and negation is expressed by the particles nuk or s' in front of the verb, for example:
For more information on verb conjugation and on inflection of other parts of speech, see Albanian morphology.
Albanian verbs, like those of other Balkan languages, have an "admirative" mood (mënyra habitore) that is used to indicate surprise on the part of the speaker or to imply that an event is known to the speaker by report and not by direct observation. In some contexts, this mood can be translated using English "apparently".
Albanian has developed an analytical verbal structure in place of the earlier synthetic system, inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Its complex system of moods (six types) and tenses (three simple and five complex constructions) is distinctive among Balkan languages. There are two general types of conjugations.
The definite article is placed after the noun as in many other Balkan languages, like in Romanian, Macedonian and Bulgarian.
The following table shows the declension of the feminine noun vajzë (girl):
The following shows the declension of the masculine noun zog (bird), a masculine noun which takes "u" in the definite singular:
The following shows the declension of mal (mountain), a masculine noun which takes "i" in the definite singular:
Albanian has a canonical word order of SVO (subject–verb–object) like English and many other Indo-European languages.[46] Albanian nouns are inflected by gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) and number (singular and plural). There are five declensions with six cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), although the vocative only occurs with a limited number of words, and the forms of the genitive and dative are identical (a genitive is produced when the prepositions i/e/të/së are used with the dative). Some dialects also retain a locative case, which is not present in standard Albanian. The cases apply to both definite and indefinite nouns, and there are numerous cases of syncretism.
Although the Indo-European schwa (ə or -h2-) was preserved in Albanian, in some cases it was lost, possibly when a stressed syllable preceded it.[42] Until the standardization of the modern Albanian alphabet, in which the schwa is spelled as ë, as in the work of Gjon Buzuku in the 16th century, various vowels and gliding vowels were employed, including ae by Lekë Matrënga and é by Pjetër Bogdani in the late 16th and early 17th century.[43][44] The schwa in Albanian has a great degree of variability from extreme back to extreme front articulation.[45] Within the borders of Albania, the phoneme is pronounced about the same in both the Tosk and the Gheg dialect due to the influence of standard Albanian. Howevever, in the Gheg dialects spoken in the neighbouring Albanian-speaking areas of Kosovo and Macedonia, the phoneme is still pronounced as back and rounded.[45]
Notes:
Standard Albanian has 7 vowels and 29 consonants. Gheg uses long and nasal vowels, which are absent in Tosk, and the mid-central vowel ë is lost at the end of the word. The stress is fixed mainly on the last syllable. Gheg n (femën: compare English feminine) changes to r by rhotacism in Tosk (femër).
Standard Albanian, based on the Tosk dialect of southern Albania, is the official language of Albania and Kosovo and is also official in municipalities of the Republic of Macedonia where ethnic Albanians form more than 20% of the municipal population. It is also an official language of Montenegro, where it is spoken in municipalities with ethnic Albanian populations.
Albanian is spoken by approximately 7.6 million people,[39][40] mainly in Albania, Kosovo, Turkey, the Republic of Macedonia, Greece and Italy (Arbereshe) and by immigrant communities in many other countries, notably the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
Before World War II the language predominantly used for official purposes was Gheg Albanian because King Zog I was a Gheg leader.[32] Prior to World War II, dictionaries consulted by developers of the standard have included Lexikon tis Alvanikis glossis (Albanian: Fjalori i Gjuhës Shqipe (Kostandin Kristoforidhi, 1904),[33] Fjalori i Bashkimit (1908),[33] and "Fjalori i Gazullit" (1941).[34] After World War II standard Albanian is based on the Tosk dialect, while standardization was directed by the Institute of Albanian Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Albania.[35] Two dictionaries were published in 1954: an Albanian language dictionary and a Russian–Albanian dictionary. New orthography rules were eventually published in 1967[35] and 1973 (Drejtshkrimi i gjuhës shqipe (Orthography of the Albanian Language).[36] More recent dictionaries from the Albanian government are Fjalori Drejtshkrimor i Gjuhës Shqipe (1976) (Orthographic Dictionary of the Albanian Language)[37] and Dictionary of Today's Albanian language (Fjalori Gjuhës së Sotme Shqipe) (1980).[35][38]
Albanian is divided into two major dialects: Gheg, Tosk, and a transitional dialect zone between them.[30] The Shkumbin river is roughly the dividing line, with Gheg spoken north of the Shkumbin and Tosk south of it.[31] There are also other dialects like Arbëresh and Arvanitika, which are mixtures between Gheg and Tosk with some archaic features of Albanian. They are spoken in some areas of Italy and Greece.
The oldest known Albanian printed book, Meshari, or "missal", was written in 1555 by Gjon Buzuku, a Roman Catholic cleric. In 1635, Frang Bardhi wrote the first Latin–Albanian dictionary. The first Albanian school is believed to have been opened by Franciscans in 1638 in Pdhanë.
References to the existence of Albanian as a distinct language survive from the 14th century, but they failed to cite specific words. The oldest surviving documents written in Albanian are the "Formula e pagëzimit" (Baptismal formula), Un'te paghesont' pr'emenit t'Atit e t'Birit e t'Spertit Senit. ("I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit") recorded by Pal Engjelli, Bishop of Durrës in 1462 in the Gheg dialect, and some New Testament verses from that period.
The center of Albanian settlement remained the Mat river. In AD 1079 they are recorded farther south in the valley of the Shkumbin river.[26] The Shkumbin, a seasonal stream that lies near the old Via Egnatia, is approximately the boundary of the primary dialect division for Albanian, Tosk-Gheg. The characteristics of Tosk and Gheg in the treatment of the native and loanwords from other languages are evidence that the dialectal split preceded the Slavic migration to the Balkans,[27][28][13] which means that in that period (5th to 6th centuries AD) Albanians were occupying pretty much the same area around the Shkumbin river, which straddled the Jireček Line.[29][24]
The place where the Albanian language was formed is uncertain, but analysis has suggested that it was in a mountainous region rather than on a plain or seacoast:[24] while the words for plants and animals characteristic of mountainous regions are entirely original, the names for fish and for agricultural activities (such as ploughing) are borrowed from other languages.[25] A deeper analysis of the vocabulary, however, shows that this could be a consequence of the prolonged Latin domination of the coastal and plain areas of the country, rather than evidence of the original environment where the Albanian language was formed. For example, the word for 'fish' is borrowed from Latin, but not the word for 'gills', which is native. Indigenous are also the words for 'ship', 'raft' and 'navigation', 'sea shelves' and a few names of fish kinds, but not the words for 'sail', 'row', 'harbor', objects pertaining navigation itself and a large part of sea fauna. This rather shows that Proto-Albanians were pushed away from coastal areas in early times (probably after the Latin conquest of the region) thus losing large parts (or the majority) of sea environment lexicon. A similar phenomenon could be observed with agricultural terms. While the words for 'arable land', 'corn', 'wheat', 'cereals', 'vineyard', 'yoke', 'harvesting', cattle breeding etc are native, the words for 'plowing', 'farm' and 'farmer', agricultural practices, and some harvesting tools are foreign. This, again, points to intense contacts with other languages and people, rather than providing evidence of a possible Urheimat.
Albanian, Basque, and the surviving Celtic languages such as Irish and Welsh are the non-Romance languages today that have this sort of extensive Latin element dating from ancient Roman times, which have undergone the sound changes associated with the languages.
Other authors[23] have detected Latin loanwords in Albanian with an ancient sound pattern from the 1st century BC, for example, Albanian qingëlë from Latin cingula and Albanian e vjetër from Latin vetus/veteris. The Romance languages inherited these words from Vulgar Latin: Vulgar *cingla became N. Romanian chinga, meaning "belly band, saddle girth", and Vulgar veteran became N. Romanian bătrân, meaning "old".
Haralambie Mihăescu demonstrated that:
Eqrem Çabej also noticed, among other things, the archaic Latin elements in Albanian:[19]
[18]
Albanian language, Tirana, Korçë, Albania, World War II
Albanian language, Serbian language, Peć, Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, Alexander Pushkin
Albanian language, Albania, Tirana, Albanian literature, Gjirokastër