Lingualia LingualiaEurope’s regional and minority languages

Languages · Albanian

Albanian

Spoken in : Greece, Italy

01. Data about the language

Language group

Indo-European / Albanian

Area

Albanian is spoken in small isolated communities widely separated from each other in present-day central and southern Greece. Albanian is also spoken in communities in western Epirus.

Spoken as a minority language in

Greece, Italy Since the end of the Middle Age there were some isolated spots of arvanitiks. At that time, migrants from Albania came to settle there. At the end of the Balkan wars in 1913 the southern part of Epiros, peopled mainly by Albanians, was given to Greece.

02. Poem

Listen to the poem

Restored version (background noise reduced, level evened out) · 0:11 · Download · unprocessed original (MP3 11,025 kHz, mono)

Original Translation
Diku në botë
By the wanders of the world
Po qu se nuk të shkruaj miku im i dashur dhe po qe se nuk ma dëgjon zërin merr një karafil e ma kërko varrin diku në botëc
If I shall cease writing you, my friend And if my voice Could reach you no longer Go with a carnation in your fingers And look for my grave By the wanders of the world
Ali Podrimja
Acknowledgements to Christiane Chevigny - Aires magazine
read by Linda

03. Linguistic description

Albanian places the definite article at the end of the noun, as a suffix1. It also has a dedicated verbal form to mark that a fact is reported or inferred rather than witnessed, and an optative to express wishes1.

In Italy, the Arbëresh communities descend from populations who left southern Albania in the 15th century under Ottoman pressure. Their Tosk-type varieties have faithfully kept the original grammatical structure while borrowing from neighbouring Romance dialects2.

Sources

The 2003 CD had no description of this language: this text was written for the site from the sources below.

  1. WALS Online – Albanian, World Atlas of Language Structures, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2013 (v2026).
  2. L. M. Savoia, « Le varietà italoalbanesi », Linguistik online 141, Universität Bern, 2025.

04. Cartoon

Watch on YouTube ▶

Pastiçerja Punëtore | The Hardworking Confectioner Story | Perralla per femije | Perralla Shqip
Cartoon · 6 min 44 s · channel: Albanian Fairy Tales · YouTube

Video hosted on YouTube and published by the channel shown; its author may remove it at any time.