49 Facts About Albanian language

1.

Standard Albanian language is a standardised form of spoken Albanian language based on Tosk.

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2.

Albanian language is the official language of Albania and Kosovo and co-official in North Macedonia and Montenegro.

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3.

Albanian language is spoken by a minority in Greece, specifically in the Thesprotia and Preveza regional units and in a few villages in Ioannina and Florina regional units in Greece.

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4.

Albanian language is the third most common mother tongue among foreign residents in Italy.

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5.

Many are descendants of the Janissary of Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian language who became Wali, and self-declared Khedive of Egypt and Sudan.

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6.

Albanian language is spoken by Albanian language diaspora communities residing in Australia and New Zealand.

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7.

Albanian language has two distinct dialects, Tosk which is spoken in the south, and Gheg spoken in the north.

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8.

Cham Albanian language is spoken in North-western Greece, while Arvanitika is spoken by the Arvanites in southern Greece.

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9.

Albanian language has been written using many alphabets since the earliest records from the 15th century.

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10.

The history of Albanian language orthography is closely related to the cultural orientation and knowledge of certain foreign languages among Albanian writers.

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11.

The earliest written Albanian language records come from the Gheg area in makeshift spellings based on Italian or Greek.

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12.

In 1854, Albanian was demonstrated to be an Indo-European language by the philologist Franz Bopp.

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13.

Albanian language was formerly compared by a few Indo-European linguists with Germanic and Balto-Slavic, all of which share a number of isoglosses with Albanian language.

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14.

In current scholarship there is evidence that Albanian is closely related to Greek and Armenian, while the fact that it is a satem language is less significant.

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15.

Albanian language is mentioned in the Descriptio Europae Orientalis dated in 1308:.

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16.

However, as Fortson notes, Albanian language written works existed before this point; they have simply been lost.

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17.

The existence of written Albanian is explicitly mentioned in a letter attested from 1332, and the first preserved books, including both those in Gheg and in Tosk, share orthographic features that indicate that some form of common literary language had developed.

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18.

Albanian language is part of the Indo-European language group and is considered to have evolved from one of the Paleo-Balkan languages of antiquity, although it is still uncertain which particular Paleo-Balkan language represents the ancestor of Albanian, or where in southern Europe that population lived.

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19.

However, they argued that this fact is hardly significant, as Albanian language has lost much of its original vocabulary and morphology, and so this "apparently close connection to Germanic rests on only a couple of lexical cognates – hardly any evidence at all".

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20.

American linguist Eric Hamp stated that during an unknown chronological period a pre-Albanian language population inhabited areas stretching from Poland to the southwestern Balkans.

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21.

The oldest surviving documents written in Albanian language are the "formula e pagezimit", Un'te paghesont' pr'emenit t'Atit e t'Birit e t'Spertit Senit.

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22.

The oldest known Albanian language printed book, Meshari, or "missal", was written in 1555 by Gjon Buzuku, a Roman Catholic cleric.

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23.

The first Albanian language school is believed to have been opened by Franciscans in 1638 in Pdhane.

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24.

One of the earliest Albanian language dictionaries was written in 1693; it was the Italian manuscript Pratichae Schrivaneschae authored by the Montenegrin sea captain Julije Balovic and includes a multilingual dictionary of hundreds of the most frequently used words in everyday life in Italian, Slavic, Greek, Albanian language, and Turkish.

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25.

In terms of linguistics, the pre-Indo-European substrate language spoken in the southern Balkans probably influenced pre-Proto-Albanian, the ancestor idiom of Albanian.

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26.

Albanian is compared to other Indo-European languages below, but note that Albanian has exhibited some notable instances of semantic drift, such as moter meaning "sister" rather than "mother".

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27.

Since World War II, standard Albanian language used in Albania has been based on the Tosk dialect.

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28.

Until the early 20th century, Albanian language writing developed in three main literary traditions: Gheg, Tosk, and Arbereshe.

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29.

The Congress of Manastir of Albanian writers held in 1908 recommended the use of the Elbasan subdialect for literary purposes and as a basis of a unified national language.

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30.

Since the fall of the communist regime, Albanian language orthography has stirred heated debate among scholars, writers, and public opinion in Albania and Kosovo, with hardliners opposed to any changes in the orthography, moderates supporting varying degrees of reform, and radicals calling for a return to the Elbasan dialect.

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31.

Criticism of Standard Albanian language has centred on the exclusion of the 'me+' infinitive and the Gheg lexicon.

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32.

In general, those involved in the language debate come from diverse backgrounds and there is no significant correlation between one's political views, geographic origin, and position on Standard Albanian.

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33.

The schwa in Albanian language has a great degree of variability from extreme back to extreme front articulation.

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34.

However, in the Gheg dialects spoken in the neighbouring Albanian language-speaking areas of Kosovo and North Macedonia, the phoneme is still pronounced as back and rounded.

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35.

Albanian language nouns are categorised by gender and inflected for number and case.

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36.

Albanian language has developed an analytical verbal structure in place of the earlier synthetic system, inherited from Proto-Indo-European.

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37.

Verbal negation in Albanian is mood-dependent, a trait shared with some fellow Indo-European languages such as Greek.

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38.

Albanian is the only Balkan language that has preseved the Pre Indo-European vigesimal system.

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39.

Albanian language scripts were produced earlier than the first attested document, "formula e pagezimit", but none yet have been discovered.

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40.

Major work in reconstructing Proto-Albanian language has been done with the help of knowledge of the original forms of loans from Ancient Greek, Latin and Slavic, while Ancient Greek loanwords are scarce the Latin loanwords are of extreme importance in phonology.

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41.

The presence of loanwords from more well-studied languages from time periods before Albanian was attested, reaching deep back into the Classical Era, has been of great use in phonological reconstructions for earlier ancient and medieval forms of Albanian.

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42.

Some words in the core vocabulary of Albanian have no known etymology linking them to Proto-Indo-European or any known source language, and as of 2018 are thus tentatively attributed to an unknown, unattested, pre-Indo-European substrate language; some words among these include and .

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43.

Some scholars argue that Albanian originated from an area located east of its present geographic spread due to the several common lexical items found between the Albanian and Romanian languages.

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44.

Therefore, he believed that the word Shqiptar "Albanian language person" was derived from, which in turn was derived from the Latin word.

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45.

Romanian scholars such as Vatasescu and Mihaescu, using lexical analysis of the Albanian language, have concluded that Albanian was heavily influenced by an extinct Romance language that was distinct from both Romanian and Dalmatian.

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46.

Albanian language is known to possess a small set of loans from Gothic, with early inquiry into the matter done by Norbert Jokl and Sigmund Feist, though such loans had been claimed earlier in the 19th century by early linguists such as Gustav Meyer.

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47.

Martin Huld defends the significance of the admittedly sparse Gothic loans for Albanian studies arguing that Gothic is the only clearly post-Roman and "pre-Ottoman" language after Latin with a notable influence on the Albanian lexicon .

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48.

Albanian language argues that Gothic words in Albanian are attributable to the late fourth and early fifth centuries during the invasions of various Gothic speaking groups of the Balkans under Alaric, Odoacer, and Theodoric.

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49.

Albanian language has maintained since Proto-Indo-European a specific term referring to a riverside forest, as well as its words for marshes.

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