Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The language is spoken by approximately 6 million people in the Balkans, primarily in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. [1] However, due to old communities in Italy and the large Albanian diaspora, the worldwide total of speakers is much higher than in Southern Europe and numbers approximately 7.5 million.
The origin of the Albanians has been the subject of historical, linguistic, archaeological and genetic studies. The first mention of the ethnonym Albanoi occurred in the 2nd century AD by Ptolemy describing an Illyrian tribe who lived around present-day central Albania.
The Article 14 of the Albanian Constitution states that "The official language in the Republic of Albania is Albanian." [2] According to the 2011 population census, 2,765,610, 98.767% of the population declared Albanian as their mother tongue ("mother tongue is defined as the first or main language spoken at home during childhood").
During the Italian occupation, Albania's population was subject to a policy of forced Italianization by the kingdom's Italian governors, in which the use of the Albanian language was discouraged in schools while the Italian language was promoted. At the same time, the colonization of Albania by Italians was encouraged.
Albanology, also known as Albanian studies, is an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities that addresses the language, costume, literature, art, culture and history of Albanians. Within the studies the scientific methods of literature, linguistics, archeology, history and culture are used.
The change of literary language has had significant political and cultural consequences because the Albanian language is the main criterion for Albanian self identity. [7] The standardization has been criticized, notably by the writer Arshi Pipa , who claimed that the move had deprived Albanian of its richness at the expense of the Ghegs. [ 8 ]
The Albanian–Eastern Romance linguistic parallels are subject of historical and contact linguistic research applied to the Albanian and Eastern Romance languages (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Romanian and Istro-Romanian). It has also been studied to understand the history of Albanian and Eastern Romance speakers.
Albanoid or Albanic is a branch or subfamily of the Indo-European (IE) languages, of which Albanian language varieties are the only surviving representatives. In current classifications of the IE language family, Albanian is grouped in the same IE branch with Messapic , an ancient extinct language of Balkan provenance that is preserved in about ...