Albanian

Albanian holds a position very few languages hold: it is its own branch of Indo-European, and the only living member of that branch.

What does that mean for a learner? It means there is no shortcut in. Learn Italian and Spanish is half open already; learn Russian and Polish comes much cheaper. With Albanian there is nothing. Greek, German and Hindi are all its relatives, and all equally remote.

But that is also the reward. Albanian vocabulary is a sediment of the entire history of the Balkans: an ancient Indo-European floor, a very thick Latin layer from Roman rule, a Slavic layer, and a Turkish layer from five Ottoman centuries. Reading Albanian means reading that history in the dictionary itself.

There is a practical reason too: Albanian opens two societies, not one. Albania and Kosovo are separate countries with very different recent histories and one shared language, plus large communities in North Macedonia, Montenegro, Italy and Greece.

Academically, Albanian is also a key to the Balkan sprachbund — the phenomenon of unrelated languages in one region converging on the same grammar. The definite article attached to the end of the noun is the clearest example, and Albanian shares it with Romanian despite no close relationship between them.

What makes Albanian remarkable is that it resembles nothing else. It is its own branch of Indo-European, and learning it means learning a way of organising language that no other survivor preserves.

The script is surprisingly tidy: thirty-six letters, very nearly one sound each, read it and you have it. But underneath that easy surface sit rare things — the definite article welded onto the end of the noun, and the habitore, a verb form used only when the speaker has just discovered something and is still surprised by it. Very few languages on earth have a dedicated mood for astonishment.

Albanian grammar has four large features, and three of them are things English simply does not do.

One: the definite article is a suffix. mal is mountain, mali is the mountain; vajzë is girl, vajza is the girl. This is a Balkan areal feature, and Romanian does it too despite no close relationship.

Two: nouns decline. There are five cases, marked by endings, assigning the noun its role in the sentence — like German but with one case more.

Three: verbs have six moods. Beyond the familiar indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative, Albanian has an optative for blessings and curses, and the habitore — the admirative.

The habitore deserves its own paragraph, because very few languages anywhere have one. It marks that the speaker has just learnt something and is surprised by it, or that the information is reported rather than witnessed. English needs a whole phrase — so it turns out that — where Albanian changes a verb ending.

Four: word order is fairly free, since the cases already mark who does what. Free does not mean arbitrary, though: fronting an element is how you emphasise it.

Reading Albanian is easier than listening, because the spelling is regular and written word order is tidier than speech.

Start with news. Albanian and Kosovar papers are all online, written in the standard, on predictable subjects. The one obstacle is the learned Latin vocabulary the press likes — but that is exactly where a reader with French or Italian collects most.

Next come short stories. Modern Albanian literature has a rare advantage: Ismail Kadare is translated into dozens of languages, so you can read the Albanian beside a translation you understand. At intermediate level this is the most efficient reading there is.

One thing to know about older material: orthography was not unified before 1972, and publications from Kosovo before then may follow different conventions. If an old book looks misspelt, your memory is not at fault.

And attend to word endings from the start. In Albanian the grammatical information lives at the end of the word — article, case, number. Skim past the endings and you lose half the sentence.

Listening is where the two dialects become unmistakable, so it is worth being direct about it from the start.

Standard Tosk is what you hear on Albanian national news, in dubbed film and in course material. It is the place to begin, because it matches the book in front of you.

Gheg is what you hear in Kosovo, in northern Albania, and in most of the Albanian pop music currently circulating. The largest difference for a learner's ear is the nasal vowels, which standard Tosk does not have, and a set of quite different verb endings.

The practical approach: listen to Tosk for the first six months to build the foundation, then open up Gheg. Doing both from week one tends to muddle rather than help.

The easiest way in is television news — measured delivery, standard pronunciation, pictures to guess from. Podcasts and interviews come next. Music is enjoyable but mostly Gheg, so save it.

One tip specific to Albanian: since the grammatical information sits in word endings and endings are exactly what gets swallowed in fast speech, replay a short clip several times rather than listening once to a long one.

Albanians are generally delighted to find a foreigner speaking their language, because it is rare. That is a genuine advantage: you will be listened to far more patiently than when practising English or French.

Three things to get right early.

Pick the right pronoun. Albanian distinguishes familiar ti from formal ju, like French. With older people and strangers, use ju.

Learn some of the set wishes. Albanian culture uses formulae for a remarkable number of occasions — to someone who has just bought something, to someone who has just bathed, to someone who is eating. English has nothing comparable, and using them well earns immediate goodwill.

Accept that you will get cases wrong. The five noun cases are where learners stay wrong longest, well after they are otherwise fluent. Getting a case wrong still leaves you understood; staying silent for fear of it is what actually blocks progress.

If you are learning for use in Kosovo, be aware of this: speaking standard Tosk in Kosovo is perfectly comprehensible but sounds bookish. Not wrong, just immediately recognisable as learnt from a textbook.

Writing Albanian has one error that outstrips all others in frequency: leaving out ë.

Because it is barely voiced at the end of a word, the ear never reminds the writer it is there. But it is part of standard orthography, and omitting it is an error. Albanians themselves drop it constantly when texting; in serious writing they do not.

The next convention: the nine digraphs are indivisible. When breaking a line you may not split dh, gj, ll, nj, rr, sh, th, xh or zh.

On register, formal written Albanian uses far more Latin-derived vocabulary than speech, along with heavy nominalisation. Albanian administrative prose reads densely, and that is the norm rather than bad writing.

A note on historical spelling: the current standard dates from 1972. Older texts, and some Kosovo publications from before then, follow other conventions. When quoting old material, keep the original spelling.

A few things are worth knowing before using Albanian with Albanians.

Besa is the central concept. It is a pledge of honour, and in the Kanun keeping it ranks above life itself. To say someone has broken their besa is a very serious accusation.

Guests rank extraordinarily high. Under the Kanun the house belongs to the guest while the guest is in it. In practice this means you will be pressed to eat repeatedly, and refusing once is normal politeness while refusing indefinitely is not.

Head gestures may be reversed. In some areas a slight shake means yes and a upward toss means no. It is not uniform across the country, but if you meet it, do not read it backwards.

Albania and Kosovo are two countries. One language, very different recent histories, and conflating them in conversation is best avoided.

Finally, a fact worth carrying: Albania was one of the very few European countries to end the Second World War with more Jews than it began with, because families took in refugees and treated it as besa.