International Albanian Language Course

Phonetics of Albanian

The letters of the Albanian alphabet and their pronunciation.

The Albanian language uses the Latin alphabet. There are 36 letters that correspond to the 36 sounds (7 vowels and 29 consonants). Seven of them (dh, gj, nj, sh, th, xh, zh) are letter combinations.(digraphs, each of them are considered to be a single letter). Unlike many European languages, Albanian words have no silent letters and letters are pronounced only one way. The correct pronunciation of the letters, therefore, provides the right pronunciation of the words. 

For spelling purposes the consonants are pronounced with a following ë, ( a sound like e in English "winter"), e.g. bë, cë, dë, etc.

The letters of the Albanian alphabet are:

(Capital Letters)
A B C Ç D Dh E E F G Gj H I J K L Ll M N Nj O P Q R Rr S Sh T Th U V X Xh Y Z Zh

(Lowercase Letters)
a b c ç d dh e ë f g gj h i j k l ll m n nj o p r rr s sh t th u v x xh y z zh

Of these, a, e, ë, i, o, u, y are vowels and the remainder are consonants. 

We will now analyze the vowels and consonants of modern literary Albanian. There are two main dialects in Albanian: Gheg or northern dialect and Tosk or southern dialect. This later one is used as the modern literary Albanian.The Gheg dialect is also in use in Albania and among Albanians living outside Albanian's territory (such as in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro).

The Albanians' own name for their language is Shqip.     © Copyright "Mësoni shqip" by Çezar Kurti

Language  history. 

Albanian was proven to be an Indo-European language in 1854  by the German philologist Franz Bopp. The Albanian language is its own independent branch of the Indo-European language family with no living close relatives. There is no scholarly consensus over its origin. Some scholars maintain that it derives from the Illyrian language, and others claim that it derives from Daco-Thracian (Illyrian and Daco-Thracian however might have been closely related languages). This question is often loaded with political implications, but linguistically, the problem is very open; a recent linguist has even stated that Illyrian and Thracian may have been as close as Czech to Slovak (Paliga, 2002). 

Albanian has been written with many different alphabets since the 15th century. Originally, the Tosk dialect was written with the Greek alphabet and the Gheg dialect was written with the Latin alphabet. They have both also been written with the Ottoman Turkish version of the Arabic alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and some local alphabets. The modern Albanian alphabet was standardized in 1909, and is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the letters e,c, and nine digraphs. 

There are Albanian words which have cognates (of non-Latin origin) in Romanian and there is a theory that the language spoken by the Dacians before the Romanization was a language related to proto-Albanian. Although there's no documentation on the Albanian language prior to the 15th century AD, it is widely assumed that Greek and Balkan  Latin (which was the ancestor of Romanian and other Balkan Romance languages), would exert a great influence on Albanian. After the Slavs arrived in the Balkans, another source of Albanian vocabulary were the Slavic language, especially Bulgarian. The rise of the Ottoman Empire meant an influx of Turkish words; this also entailed the borrowing of Persian and Arabic words through Turkish. Some loanwords from Modern Greek also exist especially in the south of Albania. Also due to the large population of Roma Gypsies in Albania words such as "jaan" or "xhan" in Albanian and Hindi mean the same thing which literally translates as "my life" or "my soul" but is also used to refer to a beloved one as "darling"  

Albanian nouns are inflected by gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) and number (singular and plural). There are 4 declensions with 6 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and vocative), although the vocative only occurs with a limited number of words. The cases apply to both definite and indefinite nouns and there are numerous cases of syncretism. The equivalent of a genitive is formed by using the prepositions i/e/t/s with the dative. 

Albanian has developed an analytical verbal structure in place of the earlier synthetic system, inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Its complex system of moods (6 types) and tenses (3 simple and 5 complex constructions) is distinctive among Balkan languages. There are two general types of conjugation. In Albanian the Constituent Order is Subject Verb Object and negation is expressed by the particles nuk or s' in front of the verb.