The Albanian language is one of the very few Indo-European languages without any sister language(s). German and English, on the one hand, belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, just like, for instance, Italian and Spanish are part of the Romance branch. Albanian, on the other hand, forms a single unique branch, like Armenian, thus lacking a closely related sister language. There are roughly 7 to 8 million native speakers of Albanian, mainly in Albania and Kosovo, but also in surrounding states like Greece, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Italy, as well as further speakers of the diaspora in states like Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, the United States of America, etc.
The Albanian language can be subdivided into two dialect groups: Tosk and Geg. Tosk dialects are spoken south of the river Shkumbin in southern Albania, Greece as well as in parts of southern Italy, whereas Geg dialects are spoken north of the river Shkumbin in northern Albania, North Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and Kosovo.
In order to promote the underrepresented dialect of the north, the focus of this dictionary lies on the Geg varieties, especially as spoken in Kosovo. Most entries reflect actual Geg Albanian language use, while some others may refer to the standard language, which is almost absolutely based on the Tosk dialect from southern Albania.
This website is supported by two SNF funds, due to Adrian Kuqi’s participation in the project “Albanisch im Kontakt: Horizontaler Transfer und Identitätsstiftung in der Mehrsprachigkeit” as well as because of Anastasia Escher’s participation in the project “’Ill-bred sons’, family and friends: tracing the multiple affiliations of Balkan Slavic”.
Adrian Kuqi received his master’s degree in General Linguistics from the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany. In his thesis, he compiled a short sketch grammar of the Geg Albanian dialect from Kosovo, and he is currently continuing to conduct research on the Albanian language. His main interests are language documentation, variation linguistics, and dialectology.
Anastasia Escher is a computational linguist and PostDoc researcher at the university of Zurich.
