- Official language in
- Albania, Kosovo
- Script
- Latin
Where it's spoken
Albanian is the official language of Albania: the country's constitution names Albanian as the Republic's official language. It is also an official language of Kosovo, whose constitution names Albanian alongside Serbian. The Tosk-based standard form of Albanian that developed in Albania was later also adopted in Kosovo, according to a study of Albanian-language politics in the region.
Sources
- Albania's Constitution of 1998 with Amendments through 2016 (English translation) — Constitute Project — Article 14, paragraph 1
- Kosovo's Constitution of 2008 (English translation) — Constitute Project — Article 5, paragraph 1
- Kamusella, Tomasz (2016). "The idea of a Kosovan language in Yugoslavia's language politics." International Journal of the Sociology of Language, issue 242, pp. 217–237 — Abstract
Script & pronunciation
Albanian is written in a Latin alphabet that adds the letters ë and ç to the ones familiar from English, along with nine two-letter combinations that each stand for a single sound: dh, gj, ll, nj, rr, sh, th, xh, and zh. Reading this app's text means treating each of those two-letter combinations as one sound rather than two, as in "A flisni anglisht?" ("Do you speak English?"), where sh is a single sound, and "Është në rregull" ("It's OK / I'm fine"), where ë appears twice.
Sources
- Unicode CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) — Albanian (sq) locale data, common/main/sq.xml — exemplarCharacters element
Grammar essentials
Albanian word order is relatively free. A study of Albanian and English sentence types found that Albanian's normal word order, like English's, is subject-verb-object, but that Albanian also allows inverted orders, such as object-verb-subject, for emphasis, without changing which word plays which grammatical role. Questions are typically formed by placing the word A at the front of the sentence rather than by moving a verb, as in this app's card "A flisni anglisht?" ("Do you speak English?"), whose grammar note marks A as what turns the sentence into a yes/no question. Negation places a particle directly before the verb: this app's card "Nuk kuptoj" ("I don't understand") notes that negation puts nuk before the verb, the same pattern found in the study's own example "A nuk e bëre (ti) atë?" ("Didn't you do it?"). A different particle, mos, negates commands instead, as in the study's own example "(Ti) Mos e thyej derën!" ("Don't break the door!").
Sources
- Mahmudi, Rilind; Ismaili Mahmudi, Majlinda (2021). "Word Order in English and Albanian Sentence Types." ANGLISTICUM. Journal of the Association-Institute for English Language and American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 10–17 — pp. 12–15 (word order, question formation, negation examples)