Albanian belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is the only still existing representative of its own language branch. Nowadays, Albanian is the official language of Albania (3 million speakers) and in Kosovo, and a minority language in some other countries of South-Eastern Europe and in Italy.
The hypothesis is that Albanian either comes from the Illyrian language or that it developed from the Indo-European languages of the Balkans and would therefore be more closely related to Greek and Armenian. Its vocabulary contains many words borrowed from Latin and some from Old-Greek; later it also absorbed words from Bulgarian, Italian, French and Turkish.
The Albanian language area can be divided into two main dialect zones: Gheg in the north and Tosk in the south.
Hello - mirëdita
Cheers - Gëzuar
You are not alone - NUK JE VETЁM
Because of a changing cultural environment, Albanian was written in four different alphabets during its history: in the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets. In 1908, the Albanians agreed to use hte Latin alphabet with the two special letters Ç/ç and Ë/ë.
Albanians in Bulgaria (3.000 Speaker)
Albanians in Turkey (13.000 Speaker)
Albanians in Greece (23.000 Speaker)
Albanians / Arbëreshë in Italy (98.000 Speaker)
Albanians in Serbia (61.647 Speaker)
Albanians in Slovenia (4.000 Speaker)
Albanians in Macedonia (443.000 Speaker)
Albanians in Montenegro (80.000 Speaker)
Albanians in Croatia (15.000 Speaker)