Editing Language/Tosk-albanian/Culture/History

'''Si jeni''', Albanian Learners? 😃

➡ In today's lesson you will learn about the history of the Albanian language.

Albanian is an Indo-European language.

The Albanian language is an Indo-European language spoken in Albania and by smaller numbers of ethnic Albanians in other parts of the southern Balkans, along the eastern coast of Italy, and in Sicily, southern Greece , Germany, Sweden, United States, Ukraine and Belgium.

Albanian remains to this day the only modern representative of a distinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The Albanian name has been found in documents 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 very early by the Greek language.

The Albanian language (shqip) is spoken by more than six million people in the southwestern Balkans, mainly in the Republic of Albania and in border countries that were once part of the Yugoslav federation (Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia ).

The two main dialects, Gheg in the north and Tosk in the south, are roughly separated by the Shkumbin River. Gheg and Tosk have diverged for at least a millennium, and their less extreme forms are mutually intelligible.

==History==

The official language, written in a standard Roman spelling adopted in 1909, was based on the southern Elbasan Gheg dialect from the start of the Albanian state until World War II and then was modeled on Tosk. Kosovo and North Macedonian Albanians speak eastern varieties of gheg, but since 1974 have largely adopted a common spelling with Albania.

The Albanian language is similar to English in its sentence construction, which supports a perfectly typical Subject – Verb – Object construction. Nouns in the Albanian language can take a masculine, feminine or neuter form, as well as a singular or plural form. As with many Balkan languages, in common sentence structure the definite article is placed after the noun.

The alphabet has been used officially since the standardization of 1908. It uses digraphs and two diacritics, the umlaut as well as the cedilla (one can also count the circumflex accent used for the gègue, often replaced by a tilde in linguistic works). Digraphs and diacritical letters count as independent graphemes and not as variants (which is the case for ‹ é ›, ‹ è ›, ‹ ê › and ‹ ë › in French, variants of ‹ e › for alphabetical ordering ). Albanian was previously notated by various original alphabets, such as the Todhri script, Elbasan, Buthakukye and Argyrokastron, Greek, Cyrillic or a modified Latin alphabet different from that used today.

The current alphabet is almost phonological: in absolute terms, all the letters are always read in the same way, with the exception of e. The realizations of the letters in the standard pronunciation are given in the table above. There are dialectal variations.

===Albanian language History Lecture===

<youtube>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s96ARl57ySI</youtube>

==Source==

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s96ARl57ySI

* [[Language/Tosk-albanian/Culture/Albania-Timeline|Albania Timeline]]

* [[Language/Tosk-albanian/Culture/How-to-communicate|How to communicate]]