On the history of standard Albanian in the United States
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By Victor A. Friedman*
Without question, the two most important symbolic linguistic events in the twentieth century connected with the creation of the modern Albanian standard were the Congress of Manastir in 1908 and the Orthographic Congress of 1972. Both events marked significant moments in the unification of Albanian linguistic practice, and both had their repercussions outside of the Balkans in general, and in the United States in particular. As is well known among Albanologists (but not the general public in the U.S.), the oldest continuously published Albanian-language newspaper is “Dielli” (ÔThe SunÕ) of Boston, which celebrated its ninetieth anniversary in 1999. The printed Albanian word has been a major force in the building of modern Albanian identity and continues to be a locus of national feeling. As such, it has also functioned as an expression of linguistic politics. While these phenomena are by no means unique to Albanian, nonetheless there are specific developments that distinguish Albanian as a special case. In this paper, I would like to examine the history of standard Albanian in America as a means of reflecting on the effects and problems of standardization.
The relation of Albanian standardization to the United States can be seen in terms of three categories, which themselves are not impervious but rather overlapping: 1) the ƒmigrŽ, 2) the Academic, and 3) the Governmental. The first Albanian immigrant arrived in the United States from Kor‘ in 1876 (Skendi 1967:159), but left for Argentina. The second ŽmigrŽ was Nicholas Christopher from Katundi, who arrived in 1886 and was still alive in 1939, when the U.S. government, through the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (itself one of the most beneficial acts ever performed by a government for the preservation of history), published The Albanian Struggle in the Old World and New. Ordained as a priest in 1917, Christopher brought with him the
first 10 Albanians to settle in America, all from Katundi. By 1900 there were only 42 Albanians in Massachusetts, but the numbers quickly grew. In 1905 Petro Luarasi left Kor‘ as a result of the closing of the school for boys there and founded the society Malli i M‘m‘dheut in Buffalo, New York. This was the society to which Fan Noli was sent from Egypt in 1906 (Skendi 1959:160). In June of that year, the weekly ÒKombiÓ (ÔThe NationÕ) began publication in Boston, and, in the words of Stavro Skendi (1967:160): “Laid the cornerstone of the national movement.” ÒKombiÓ, which was the first Albanian newspaper published in the United States, was published by Sotir Peci, who two years later would be the American delegate to the Congress of Manastir.
The orthography of ÒKombiÓ is the Bashkimi (Shkod‘r) alphabet: The letters <sh>, <dh>, and <th> are as in the modern Albanian orthography, but <gn> for modern <nj> (as in Italian), <gh> for <gj>, plain <e> for <‘> and <Ž> for <e>, <ch> for <>, <c> for <q>, <ts> for< c>, etc. At the same time, there were many other competing Albanian alphabets. A letter published in ÒKombiÓ on 20 March 1907 (No. 30) from the society ÒMar‘siaÓ illustrates the problems created by this situation: ÒGjan‘ t‘ turp‘nohemi kur qillon ngahera e na thot‘ nonji i huj: ÔDua t‘ m‘soj gjuh‘n shqipe, po s’mundem, se ju keni ma se dhit‘ abetare.Õ” (Buda et al. 1972:193) ÔWe are frequently ashamed whenever some foreigner raises the criticism: ÒI want to learn Albanian, but I cannot, because you have more than ten alphabets.ÓÕ To be sure, the orthographic obstacle to the construction of Albanian national unity within the community itself, which was also mentioned in this letter, was by far the greater challenge to Albanian nation-building. Nonetheless, insofar as international recognition is an important element in achieving stability and legitimacy Ñ a lesson that has been repeated and is being repeated in parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (as well as elsewhere in the world) in recent years Ñ a unified linguistic standard represents part of the means for achieving or reinforcing such recognition.
The debate between the Stamboll and Bashkim alphabets was published in the pages of ÒKombi.Ó In 1909, ÒDielliÓ published debates that followed in the wake of the decision of the Congress of Manastir to endorse (pranuar) two alphabets (Stamboll and a modified Bashkim called ÔLatinÕ) including such criticisms as “S’pati trim‘rin‘ t‘ b‘j detyr‘n e tij dyke p‘lqyer nj‘ abece.” (Buda 1972: 219) ÔIt did not have the courage to do its duty by endorsing a single alphabetÕ, although ÒDielliÕsÓ editorial policy took the constructive view that practice would eventually decide the issue, as indeed it did. These debates included a letter from the Danish albanologist Holger Pedersen defending the Congress. Interestingly enough, 90 years later another famous foreign Albanologist, Eric Hamp, proposed an orthographic reform that would accommodate both Geg nasality and Tosk stressed schwa as well as problems associated with the representation of etymological unstressed schwa in talks given at the University of Shkod‘r and at a small workshop at Ohio State University.
Prior to the end of World War One, publications on the Albanian language in the United States were ŽmigrŽ-oriented. Thus, for example, Dako (1916) and Dako (1917) are intended exclusively for Albanian-speakers. During the interwar period, Albanian-language practice in the United States remained mixed, as illustrated by the first English-Albanian dictionary published after World War One (‚ekrezi 1923). The preface, written by Faik Konitza, used a Stamboll-influenced orthography, whereas the dictionary used the Latin orthography that became the Albanian standard. The dictionary itself is Tosk-based and relatively close to the modern standard. The interwar period also marks the beginning of the academic study of the Albanian language in the United States with the publication of Lowman (1932) — a study of Albanian phonetics, based on the dialect of Shkod‘r — in Language, the oldest and still one of the most important journals of linguistics in the United States. Prior to the end or World War Two one other scholarly article on Albanian was published in Language by the British scholar Stuart Mann (1941) — a study of Indo-European sonorants — followed after the War by Mann (1952, 1957) on vowels and consonants, respectively.
The third of our categories of relations to standardization, the Governmental, dates from World War Two, when the U.S. Department of War published an Albanian Phrase Book and Albanian: A Guide to the Spoken Language (both U.S. War Dept. 1943). It can be argued that although the United States concerned itself with the fate of Albania at least from the days of Woodrow Wilson, official interest in the Albanian language was a part of the same wartime and post-war developments that led to increasing U.S. involvement in European affairs. The language of the phrase book and language guide is, for the most part, Tosk, e.g. ‘sht[‘] ‘is’, gjilp‘r‘ ‘needle’, vaj ‘oil’, pjekur ‘cooked’ P‘r Hyrje ‘Entrance’, although occasional Gegisms are also used, e.g. m‰ ‘more’ (in all comparatives), nalt‘ ‘high;, Hymje Ndalohet ‘No Admittance’, as well as the occasional dialectal Toskism, e.g. e muarm ‘roger (received)’. Final devoicing is spelled consistently, and the distinction between <r> and <rr> is neutralized. At the time they were published, these books were intended only for military personnel, and the phrase book was officially a restricted document. These books were declassified and made available to the general public after World War Two, however. The National Security Agency has also sponsored linguistic materials for the study of Albanian, but still treats them as classified information. The one item known of outside the Agency is a four-volume bilingual word list form 1950 that ran to four volumes. The quality, however, is reported to have been quite poor.
After the war, Drizari (1948), ALS ([probably Gaspar Kii] 1950), Newmark (1954), and DFL (1965-82) constituted the means of instruction. According to Newmark (1957:126), Drizari (1948) “has practically no spoken Albanian, and is so confused in its understanding of what written Albanian is, that it is worse than useless.” By contrast, Newmark (1957:125) writes that ALS (1950) uses “a non-extreme kind of literary Gheg, quite representative of ‘standard’ Albanian.” At this point, then, the practice of using a standard based on Elbasan Geg was being followed in the U.S. Newmark’s own (1954) work was based on Tosk, particularly that of Berat. The DFL materials, which were developed by Newmark with various consultants, especially Ismail Haznedari, were later used for the Foreign Service Institute courses and ultimately resulted in Newmark et al. 1980 (revised by Newmark in consultation with Vladimir Dervishi in 1997). By the 1960’s, U.S. Government sponsorship of Albanian language materials was also coming from the Institute of International Studies of the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Thus, for example, Aleko Bimbli produced a revised version of the DFL Materials in August 1967 at the University of Chicago’s Center for Balkan and Slavic Studies, and Kostas Kazazis produced a revised set of pattern Drills in October 1968. Both these materials remained in mimeo, however. They were Tosk-based, and made use of materials from Albania (Cipo et al. 1954, Elezi and Dodbiba 1963). It is thus the case that U.S. government practice roughly followed the course of events in Albania, i.e. the shift from a Geg-based standard to a Tosk-based one. (See Byron 1973 on the creation of modern standard Albanian.)
Meanwhile, there was resistance to the emerging standard of Albania in the U.S. ŽmigrŽ community, owing to political differences between the U.S. and Albanian-Americans, on the one hand, and communist Albania, on the other. These differences combined with the influx of Geg-speakers after World War Two and the fact that until 1968-72 there were two Albanian standards impeded the acceptance of the Tosk-based standard of HoxhaÕs Albania, and Albanian-American publications continued to use Elbasan Geg. With the adoption of the Tosk-based unified language by Albanian of then-Yugoslavia, U.S. practice became more divided between conservative and innovating trends in the ŽmigrŽ community, but to this day ÒDielliÓ will publish some material in Geg.
The overlap of the three categories identified above was especially strong in the 1950s and 1960s. The study and teaching of Albanian was sponsored largely by departments of the U.S. government, but carried out at U. S. academic institutions, with the aid of Albanian ŽmigrŽs, who provided the language for the materials. Thus, for example, the first Air Force sponsored Albanian-language program was begun at Indiana University, under the directorship of Leonard Newmark, on 17 September 1951. Owing to the lack of suitable materials, Newmark wrote his own with the help of Kristina Kristoforidhi (Kora), Nikolas ‚aku, (a Romanian-Albanian), Shefqi Mita, and Bardhyl Pogoni (a Tosk poet who had fled to the north and then to Italy). Subsequently Ismail Haznedari (Berat) replaced Bardhyl Pogoni as Newmark’s chief informant. By 1969, however, when Kazazis (1969) surveyed the state of Non-Slavic East European languages in the United States, Albanian was only being taught at one academic institution: The University of Chicago.
Another academic aspect of Albanian in the United States after World War Two was the beginning of the production of doctoral dissertations whose primary focus was the Albanian language as an object of study. Since 1948, thirteen such dissertations have been completed. These are listed chronologically after the other references at the end of this article. The first four U.S. dissertations on Albanian language and linguistics (Westcott 1948, Hamp 1954, Newmark 1955, Dilaver 1964) were concerned with historical, dialectological, and structural problems. This was the period when, in Albania, the Tosk-based standard was in the process of consolidation while in Kosovo scholars continued to write in Geg. Questions of standardization were relevant for the next three dissertations: Pogoni (1967), Bevington (1970), and Byron (1973). Both Pogoni and Byron examined precisely the processes relevant to the creation of Standard Albanian, while Bevington’s dissertation, which was the first attempt to analyze part of Albanian grammar in a generative framework, made use of Cipo et al. (1954) and Z‘ri i popullit in an attempt to describe the Albanian standard, although Bevington also used forms from other works. Of the remaining seven dissertations, two (Hubbard 1980 and Massey 1991), took the standard as a given and were concerned with describing aspects of Albanian grammar in terms of it. The remaining four deal with historical, dialectological, sociolinguistic, and cognitive questions for which issues of standardization are not particularly relevant.
Hamp (1972), details the state of Albanian studies as of its time of publication both in the U.S., where only a handful of academic articles had been published (including only 9 of HampÕs own 36 contributions), and in Europe, which produced the bulk of his bibliography of approximately 600 works. After Hamp’s survey, there is a hiatus of twenty-five years, followed by three surveys of the study of Albanian, Prifti (1997), Prifti (1998), and Gosturani (1999). Prifti’s survey is concerned with the teaching of Albanian in the U.S. focusing on the ŽmigrŽ community in the first part and the Academic in the second. Gosturani’s work is a general history of Albanology and touches only on some of the better known publications of foreign Albanologists (Gosturani 1999:235, 266, 292-95).
From the point of view of language pedagogy, the implementation of the Albanian standard in English-language textbooks available in the United States of necessity lagged behind its implementation in Albania and former Yugoslavia. The earliest post-war U.S. textbook (Drizari 1947) was severely (and justifiably) criticized in Newmark (1957:127) on all fronts. Pipa (n.d., but apparently published some time in the 1960Õs) attempted to accommodate ŽmigrŽ learners and is not really suitable for those who are not of Albanian background. A Geg neighbor is introduced in Lesson 3 and there is even an Arb‘resh bricklayer in lesson 16, vocabulary is not given in order, and grammatical explanations are inadequate. Newmark, Haznedari, and Prifti (1980) is the first U.S. textbook to use standard Albanian. Camaj (1984) attempts to address both the unified standard and the older Geg standard and is thus useful as a second year book for students that already control one or the other Albanian norm. (From a pedagogical point of view, attempting to teach more than one norm to beginning students has negative consequences on their abilities to master grammar and vocabulary.) Buxhelli (1994), Shkurtaj and Hysa (1996), and Zilexhiu and Hoxha (2002) all use the standard of Albania, but they are so sparse on grammatical explanations that they cannot be used without a teacher and do not take adequate advantage of the insights that can be offered by linguistic analysis.
Zymberi (1991) raises another important issue concerning the modern Albanian standard, namely its covert polycentricity. The language of Zymberi (1991) reflects the Albanian standard as it is used in Kosova rather than Albania, and despite the basic linguistic unity, there are enough differences that any educated native speaker will notice them. This polycentricity is referred to explicitly by Zymberi (1991:3-4), and it is a highly sensitive issue, as can be seen from recent discussions concerning Kosovar identity, debates over the unified standard (gjuha e nj‘suar), and the assertion that Shqip‘ria is not coterminous with Shqiptaria, roughly ÔAlbaniaÕ and ÔAlbanian-speaking lands.Õ These debates have not received significant attention in the United States (a brief note appeared in The Economist, Vol. 354, Issue 8152, 18 January 2002, p. 50), but linguists are quite sensitive to them. At one extreme are those who call for the re-establishment of a Geg-based standard parallel to the current unified standard. Perhaps the high point of ŽmigrŽ Albanian resistance to the unified standard was PipaÕs (1989) attack, which, while flawed in some of its linguistic analyses, nonetheless contains considerable interesting material. A sort of middle ground is to be found among linguists in Kosova and Albania who speak in terms of Òopening up the standardÓ to variation or change, while nonetheless maintaining a unified norm. For these linguists (and also some non-linguists), the primary focus of attention is the Geg infinitive, which, they argue, is a gap in the current system and should at least be allowed, along with some lexical expansion (e.g., Ismajli 2002). At the other extreme are linguists who argue that the unified standard as it has been elaborated since the Orthography Congress of 1972 and as it exists today is a hard-won achievement that should not be tampered with. The Kosovar periodical Java has published on all sides of this debate. The politics of language is also involved in the equation of diversity with democracy in critiques of the unified standard versus the need for unity.
From the point of view of Standard Albanian in the United States, these debates are currently of interest mainly to the Academic and the ƒmigrŽ communities, although they have the potential to impact on pedagogy and government policy as well. From a strictly pedagogical point of view, the greatest impediment to the teaching of Albanian prior to the creation of the unified standard was the fact that the student was faced with a multiplicity of forms and paradigms for most grammatical categories as well as multiple lexical items for single concepts and no guidance concerning which to memorize. In a sense, the situation was not unlike that before the Congress of Manastir alluded to above. The current unified standard is thus a pedagogical boon and encourages the study of Albanian. On the other hand, geopolitical factors have the potential to alter this situation. The United States acknowledged and in a sense even participated in the break-up of the former Serbo-Croatian by creating, for example, separate Croatian and Serbian services for Voice of America. If the unified standard of Albanian were to devolve into two norms with different dialectal bases, this could impact on U.S. government language policy in the teaching and broadcasting of Albanian, especially if this devolution were associated with the status of Kosova. Thus, in terms of understanding the future, not only the past but also a broadly contextualized present can offer lessons.
* Victor A. Friedman is an American linguist. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago. He holds an appointment in the Department of Linguistics and an associate appointment in the Department of Anthropology.
