The language is spoken by approximately 6 million people in the Balkans, primarily in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. However, due to old communities in Italy and the large Albanian diaspora,

Albanian constitutes one of the eleven major branches of the Indo-European language family, within which it occupies an independent position. In 1854, Albanian was demonstrated to be an Indo-European language by the philologist Franz Bopp. Albanian was formerly

Since World War II, standard Albanian used in Albania has been based on the Tosk dialect. Kosovo and other areas where Albanian is official adopted the Tosk standard in 1969.
Elbasan-based standard
Until the early 20th

The Albanian language has two distinct dialects, Tosk which is spoken in the south, and Gheg spoken in the north. Standard Albanian is based on the Tosk dialect. The Shkumbin River is

The Albanian language has been written using many alphabets since the earliest records from the 15th century. The history of Albanian language orthography is closely related to the cultural orientation and knowledge of certain foreign languages among

Historical documentation
The first attested written mention of the Albanian language was on 14 July 1284 in Dubrovnik in

Standard Albanian has seven vowels and 29 consonants. Like English, Albanian has dental fricatives /θ/ (like the th in thin) and /ð/ (like the th in this), written as ⟨th⟩ and ⟨dh⟩, which are rare cross-linguistically.
Gheg uses long and nasal vowels, which are absent in