Albanian Voice Over Agency

Albanian or gjuha shqipe is anIndo-European language spoken by five million people, 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 Valleyof Serbia. Centuries-old communities speaking Albanian-based dialects can be found scattered in Greece, southern Italy, Sicily, and Ukraine. As a result of a moderndiaspora, there are also Albanian speakers elsewhere in those countries as well as in other parts of the world, including Austria,Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, theScandinavian countries, Switzerland, theUnited 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.

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”.

Linguistic affinities

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 areArmenian 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 Proto-Indo-European *ǒ and *ǎ into *ǎ in a supposed “northern group”, 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. 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. 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 debated. (See also Thraco-Illyrian and Messapian language.)

Linguistic influences

The earliest loanwords attested in Albanian come from Doric Greek, 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 BCE to the 5th century CE. 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 CE, 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 CE, 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 CE). 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.