Albanian

Mirë se vjen – Welcome

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

Top

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 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).

	Front		Central	Back
	Unrounded	Rounded
Close	i	y		u
Mid	e		ə
Open			a	ɔ

/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).

		Bilabial	Labio- dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	voiceless	p			t			k
Stops	voiced	b			d			g
Fricatives	voiceless		f	θ	s	ʃ			h
Fricatives	voiced		v	ð	z	ʒ
Affricate	voiceless				ts	tʃ	c
Affricate	voiced				dz	dʒ	ɟ
Nasals		m			n		ɲ
Lateral					l ɬ
Trill					r
Tap					ɾ
Semivowels		w				j

/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.

Tungjatjeta (tung)	Hello
Mirupafshim	Good bye
Ju lutem	Please
Faleminderit	Thank you
Më fal	Sorry
Yes	Po
No	Jo
Burrë	Man
Grua	Woman
Mirë	Good
Bad	Keq

Basic Albanian phrases

Below are the numerals 1-10 in Albanian Tosk.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
një	dy	tre	katër	pesë	gjashtë	shtatë	tetë	nëntë	dhjetë

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.

A a	B b	C c	Ç ç	D d	Dh dh	E e	Ë ë	F f	G g	Gj gj	H h
I i	J j	K k	L l	LL, ll	M m	N n	Nj nj	O o	P p	Q q	R r
R r	S s	T t	Th th	U u	V v	X x	Xh xh	Y y	Z z	Zh zh

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.

Deklarata e pergjithshme mbi te drejtat e njeriut
Neni 1.
Të gjithë njerëzit lindin të lirë dhe të barabartë në dinjitet dhe në të drejta. Ata kanë arsye dhe ndërgjegje dhe duhet të sillen ndaj njëri tjetrit me frymë vëllazërimi.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Since when does greek add the articles after the subject and in which parallel universe?
Romanian yes but dont write random stuff

Your comment is appreciated, but not your language. If you want to participate in this blog, please use language appropriate to the professional tone of this discussion. I hope that you will take this seriously.

Thank you for your comments. We are very happy to receive all the help we can get. You may be right about Albanian being a Category III language, but we go by the data from the Foreign Service Institute, and it may be unreliable in the case of Less Commonly Taught languages such as Albanian.

Greek does not have an enclitic definite article; besides Albanian and Romanian, the other Balkan languages that do have it are Bulgarian and Macedonian.

Apple: the apple:
Albanian: Mollë – molla
Bulgarian: ябълка – ябълката:
Macedonian: јаболко – јаболкото
Romanian: măr – mărul –
but Greek: μήλο – Το μήλο

There are no speakers of Albanian in Bulgaria. About a hundred years ago, the only village in Bulgaria whose population spoke Albanian was abandoned by religious reasons:

If youlern to speak Albanian you just lerned to write it. No one say it. Its not english or other languages. It is writen as it is spoken. No rules like in writen language like no other language. As you speak it you can whrite it. Simple as that.

Thank you. But I seriously doubt that any language can fully represent its sound system in writing, no matter how closely the orthography attempts to match the spoken language.

Albanian language is pronounced as it is written. You read every letter that you see, and or write every letter that you say while speaking. This is the easiest part about Albanian language, as for the grammar it is kind of difficult to learn.

No written language is an exact representation of the sound system, but some spelling systems are better than others at representing the spoken language. The reason is that the sound system is infinitely more nuanced and complex than the limited number of written symbols used to represent it.

Onscreen Keyboard

What does Onscreen Keyboard mean?

An onscreen keyboard is a software-based keyboard that is available in most operating systems, especially Microsoft Windows, and in other applications. An onscreen keyboard allows users to type text using a joystick or a pointing device. Apart from improving input options for users who are physically challenged, it also serves as an alternative to a physical keyboard.

Onscreen keyboards are also known as software keyboards or soft keyboards.

Onscreen Keyboard

An onscreen keyboard displays a virtual keyboard on the screen for users to enter input. It can be operated with the help of any pointing device such as a mouse, pen, joystick, etc. The keyboard is often resizable and customizable, allowing the typing mode, font, etc., to be changed as needed. In certain onscreen keyboards, especially those from Windows 7 and later versions, they are equipped with a predictive text engine, which helps in predicting the words the users may type.

There are several ways an onscreen keyboard can come in handy. It is useful, for example, for physically challenged users who have difficulty using a physical keyboard. It can also be used as an alternative or a temporary keyboard in case the physical keyboard becomes defective. Using an onscreen keyboard also prevents keystrokes from being captured by certain spyware programs such as keyloggers.

However, as typing on an onscreen keyboard is slower and more difficult than on a physical keyboard, most onscreen keyboards feature predictive text input.