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Last Updated: Sunday 15 August 2004
Slavic, Cyrillic, Czech

ALBANIAN is a branch of the Indo-European family tree, and consists of only one language, which is the official language of Albania having about 3.3 million speakers. It is moreover spoken in Kosovo, South Serbia and Montenegro by a further 3 million speakers; Macedonia and Greece, 840,000 speakers; Turkey with 300,000 and Italy with 90,000 speakers respectively.

The Albanian language is considered to be the only language derived from the extinct language of the Illyrians, the transition from Illyrian to Albanian apparently occurring between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. The name Albanian has been found in records since the time of Ptolemy. In Calabria, Albanian is called Arberishtja or Arberichte, in modern Greek Arvantis (Arvanite), and in Turkish Arnaut. This name must have been transmitted early through Greek speech.

Albanian was clearly classified as an Indo-European origin by the German philologist, Franz Bopp, in 1854. The details about how Albanian mainly corresponds with Indo-European languages were elaborated by another German philologist, Gustav Meyer during the 1880-1890 period. Danish linguist Holger Pedersen and Austrian Norbert Jokl also presented further linguistic refinements. Albanian shows no obvious close affinity to any other Indo-European language and it is plainly the sole modern survivor of its own subgroup. Of ancient languages, both Dacian (or Daco-Mysian) and Illyrian have been tentatively considered to be its ancestor or nearest relative.

Even so, as an Indo-European language, its origin is uncertain and it was not until 1854 that it was conclusively proven to belong to that family. The vocabulary contains many words which are not found in any other Indo-European language, though there has been considerable borrowing from Latin, Greek, Turkish, and the Slavic languages. It has striking similarities with Balkan languages, Bulgarian, Serbian, Old Greek and Romanian.

The first written documents appeared in the 15th century AD, the first book being the Meshari, or missal book, in 1555. Before 1908 when Albanian adopted a Roman style alphabet, the little literature that was preserved, was written in local makeshift Italianate or Hellenizing orthographies, or even in Turko-Arabic characters. The orthography now has 36 Latin-based letters made up of 7 vowels and 29 consonants. The official language as written in its new orthography was based on the south Gheg dialect of Elbasan from the beginning of the Albanian state in 1912 until 1945 but has since been modelled on Tosk. Albanian speakers in Kosovo and Macedonia speak eastern varieties of Gheg but have, since 1974, widely adopted a common orthography with Albania.

Albanian is divided into grammatical categories which are much like those of other Indo-European languages. Nouns show overt gender, number, and three or four cases. An unusual feature is that nouns are further inflected obligatorily with suffixes to show definite or indefinite meaning. Thus buk, bread, becomes buka, the bread. Adjectives and dependent nouns follow the noun they modify, and remarkably acquire a particle preceding them that agrees with the noun. Thus in nj burr i madh, meaning a big man, burr for man is modified by madh, meaning big, which in turn is preceded by i in concordance with the term for man. In the same manner in dy burra t mdhenj meaning two big men, mdhenj, the plural masculine form for big, follows the noun burra, men, and is preceded by a particle t that agrees with the noun.

The morphology of Albanian is relatively complex, especially in the verbal sphere , with 2 aspects, 8 tenses and 6 modes. This gives roughly the number and variety of forms found in French or Italian and are quite irregular in forming their stems. Noun plurals are also notable for the irregularity of a large number of verbs. When a definite noun is the direct object of the sentence, a pronoun in the objective case that repeats this information must also be inserted in the verb phrase. Thus, i-a dhash librin atij literally means "him-it I-gave the-book to-him" which in standard English would be "I gave the book to him". Word positioning is mostly subject-verb-object, adjectives having an end position.

The verb system includes many archaic traits, such as the retention of distinct active and middle personal endings (as in Greek) and the change of a stem vowel e in the present to o in the past tense, a feature shared with the Baltic languages. For example, there is mbledh, gathers, transitive, as well as mblidhet, gathers, is gathered, intransitive, in the present tense, and mblodha, I gathered, with an o in the past. Owing to superficial changes occurring in the phonetic form of the language over 3,000 years and the borrowing of words from a variety of neighbouring cultures, the continuity of the Indo-European heritage in Albanian has been underrated.

In general, the grammar and formal distinctions of Albanian are reminiscent of modern Greek and the Romance languages, mostly Romanian. The sounds suggest Hungarian or Greek, but Gheg with its nasal vowels strikes the ear as distinctive. Although Albanian has a host of borrowings from its neighbours, it shows exceedingly few evidences of contact with ancient Greek. Obviously close contacts with the Romans gave many Latin loans, like mik for friend, from Latin amicus; kndoj, to sing, read, from L. cantare. Furthermore, such loanwords in Albanian attest to the similarities in development of the Latin spoken in the Balkans and of Romanian, a Balkan Romance tongue. For example, Latin paludem, a swamp, became padulem, and then padure in Romanian and pyll in Albanian, both with a modified meaning for forest.

Conversely, Romanian also shares some apparently non-Latin indigenous terms with Albanian, such as the Romanian brad and Albanian bredh, meaning fir. Thus, these two languages reflect special historical contacts of early date. Early communication with the Goths presumably contributed tirq for trousers or breeches, from an old compound "thigh-breech", while early Slavic contacts gave gozhd for a nail. Many Italian, Turkish, modern Greek, Serbian and Macedonian-Slav loans can be attributed to cultural contacts over the past half-millennium with political dominances of Venetians and Ottomans, and to the geographic presence of Greeks to the south and Slavs to the east.

A fair number of features, like the formation of the future tense and of the noun phrase, are shared with other languages of the Balkans but are of obscure origin and development. Albanian or its earlier kin could easily be the source for at least some of these, yet the study of such regional features in the Balkans has now become a classic case for research on the phenomena of linguistic diffusion. TOP Ý

CYRILLIC is an alphabet used in the writing of several Slavic languages, like Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian, Russian, Serb and Ukrainian. It was developed to serve the liturgical language of Glagolitic during the 10^th century by two Greek evangelizing missionaries and brothers, Cyril and Methodius. Specially designed for Slavic-speaking people who belonged to the oriental church, Cyrillic was based on Greek and Hebrew letters. Although it originally had 43 letters due to the variety of sounds in the original and pristine Slavic language of the time, modern Cyrillic has fewer letters, depending on national phonetic divergences. Certain Slavic languages are, however, written only in the Latin (Roman) alphabet. TOP Ý

CZECH, along with Slovak, Polish and High and Low Sorbian, belongs to the West Slavic group of languages. The medieval Latin alphabet, without any modifications, was used to write down the Czech names and first glosses until the end of the 13^th century when a combinatorial system of writing appeared, using digraphs and trigraphs to write down Czech sounds that had no equivalent in the Latin alphabet. When at the beginning of the 15^th century the religious reformer Jan Hus devised a diacritical writing system, he placed diacritical marks over some Latin letters to distinguish the Czech palatal consonants (č, ď, ň, ř, š, ť, ž) and long vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý). Then, in the 16^th century ů, indicating the long u resulting from the change ó to uo to ú, was added to the list. All reforms notwithstanding, digraphs and letters with diacritical marks were juxtaposed in manuscripts and prints for several centuries until the diacritical system finally prevailed. The only digraph surviving in modern Czech is ch, with the phonetic value similar to that of the German ch or Russian х.

Czech separated itself from the other Slavic languages by a number of changes, most of which took place in the 10^th through 16^th centuries. During that period, Czech has been influenced by a number of languages, especially Old Church Slavonic, (introduced into the area by evangelizers Constantine and Methodius in the 9^th century), Latin (once the all European language of learning) and German (the language of colonists and of the Habsburg empire). From the 14th century on, Czech has been the language of a never-ending flow of literary production. By the end of the 15^th century Czech had virtually lost the dual number and two of the Slavic past tenses (the aorist and imperfect). Otherwise, the role of the verbal aspect had grown more significant and the number of declensions had increased.

The language has been recorded, described, and analyzed in a number of grammars, the first dating from 1533, and dictionaries, the first written in verse originating about 1350.

There are about 10 million speakers of Czech in Czechia and about 200,000 speakers in other countries, mostly emigrants who left the country between 1914 and 1968. Many Czech speakers can be found especially in Austria (Vienna), Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Croatia (Daruvar area), Western Romania (Banat), Australia and Canada. Several tens of thousands of Czechs have continued to live in Slovakia after 1992. Some 90,000 Czech speakers outside Czechia, the largest group of the diaspora, live in the United States, both in cities (New York, Chicago, Cleveland) and in a number of rural communities. TOP Ý

FINNISH belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group of the Uralic family which, like the Lapps, Finns, Karelians, Estonians, and Magyars (Hungarians), originated in Central Asia. TOP Ý

GHEG and TOSK. There are two main dialects of the Albanian language: Gegë is spoken in northern Albania and the adjoining southern Slav regions and in northern and western Macedonia. Toskë is spoken in southern Albania, as roughly separated from the north by the Shkumbin River, in Greece and in the language enclaves in Sicily and Calabria. Gheg and Tosk have been diverging for at least a thousand years, and are mutually intelligible in their less extreme forms.

Of the two dialects, Gheg has the more marked subvarieties, the most striking of which are the northernmost and eastern types, including those of Shkoder and the neighbouring mountains along the Montenegro border, Kosovo and Macedonia. Arbanasi, founded in the early 18th century by refugees from near Tivar has about 2,000 speakers.

All of the Albanian dialects spoken in the Italian (nearly 50 scattered villages), Sicilian (Piana degli Albanesi) and Greek enclaves are of the Tosk variety, and seem to be related most closely to a dialect in the extreme south of Albania. These dialects resulted from population movements occurring from the 13th to the 15th centuries AD. A few isolated dialects of south Tosk origin are spoken in Mandritsa, Bulgaria and Turkish Thrace. A Tosk enclave near Melitopol in the Ukraine appears to be of moderately recent settlement from Bulgaria. The Albanian dialects of Istria, which have been documented, and of Syrmia (Srem) have become extinct. TOP Ý

LITHUANIAN is rooted in ancestral abysses whose depths have never really been fathomed. A very ancient Indo-European linguistic base, similar in some respects to Sanskrit, was subsequently overlaid by Greek, Latvian, Prussian, Polish and ancient Slav lexical fragments. This archaic language, mostly spoken by peasants, has been reborn alongside Polish and Russian and is the official language of Lithuania and now one of the languages of the European Union. TOP Ý

SLAVIC, a division of the Indo-European family of languages, was a common original language which due to tribal and historical events, divided itself into three main branches – East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic.

The Slavs arrived and were settled on the territory north of the Slovak-Polish frontier at the end of the 5^th century. Living together in the new territories the Slavs spoke only one language, primitive Slavonic, until the 10^th century at the time of the migration of nations. Although mutual tribal relations of the Slavs cracked and lingual differences somewhat increased, the evolving Slavic languages still kept lingual conformity to each other.

Of the East Slavic languages, Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian are the most widely known.

Russian, spoken by about 140 million speakers, has as its main dialects the Northern Great Russian and Southern Great Russian and a smaller Central Russian dialect. The literary form is based on the dialect used in Moscow which was greatly influenced by French as spoken by the elite classes during the time of the czars.

Ukrainian, which is closely akin to Russian and Belorussian, is spoken by about 45 million people in the Ukraine and thereabouts. It is divided into the Northern, Southeastern, Southwestern and Carpathian (Ruthenian) dialects.

Belorussian is the language of Belarus, a country to the north of Ukraine and east of Poland. The language has nearly 10 million speakers with two main dialects, the Northeastern and Northwestern. The dialect of Minsk located on the border between the two major groups, prevails as the literary language used.

Of the West Slavic languages, Polish with about 40 million of speakers has four main dialects: Great Polish (northwest), Little Polish (southeast), Silesian and Mazovian.

Czech, spoken by about 10 million people, has Bohemian, Moravian and Silesian for dialects and the written language is based on the Central Bohemian dialect spoken in Prague.

Slovak, with some 5 million speakers, is the official language of Slovakia. The major dialect groups are Eastern, Central and Western.

Some lesser-known languages in the West Slavic family spoken in Europe and Russia are Sorbian (or Lusatian), Pomeranian, Kashubian and Slovincian.

The South Slavic languages, mainly Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene and Macedonian, are spoken in southern nations which are geographically cut off from the other Slavic-speaking regions and which have thus lexically tended to develop differently. The physical barrier where non-Slavic languages are spoken is formed by Romania (Romance), Hungary (Finno-Ugric) and Austria (Germanic).

Bulgarian is considered as the most closely related to the pristine Slavic language. It is spoken by some 9 million people in Bulgaria itself and by some nationals of Ukraine, former Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania and Moldova.

The Macedonian language has only very lately, in the 1940s, been recognized as a distinct Slavic language. It is closely related to Bulgarian and is spoken by about 1.5 million people in the newly formed state of Macedonia (a former Yugoslavian republic) and in the region of Makedonia in northern Greece.

Serbo-Croat is the chief language of the two nations Serbia and Croatia spoken by more than 18 million people. Other than for some minor differences in vocabulary and the use of different alphabets, Serbian (Cyrillic alphabet) and Croat (Latin) are very similar.

Slovene is the language spoken by some 2 million people in Slovenia, the uppermost Slav linguistic region bordering on the non-Slavic hinterland, in Italy and Austria.

Generally speaking, most Slavic languages, other than in the case of Bulgarian and Macedonian, are highly complex in their grammatical structure. Nouns have declensions as in Latin and Greek with forms changing according to their place and use in a sentence. Adjectives have consequently to agree in form with nouns, and verb conjugations are more convoluted. TOP Ý

TOSK. see GHEG and TOSK TOP Ý

URAL-ALTAIC languages are in Europe principally used by the Estonians, Finns, Hungarians and Lapps. The Uralic family has two main groups: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed. The best known Ugric language of the Finno-Ugric group is Hungarian, or Magyar. Finnish, Estonian, and Lapp are the best known Finnic languages. Lapp, the language of the Lapps, is spoken mostly in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Two other Finnic languages, Mordvin and Cheremis, are spoken in Russia. The Samoyed group of languages is spoken in Siberia on the Arctic coast of Russia between Pechora and Yenisey rivers. Ugrians and Samoyeds inhabit the central and northern parts of western Siberia. TOP Ý