TIRANA, Feb. 22- UNESCO has assigned Feb. 21 as the International Mother Tongue Day, a day celebrated in all the countries worldwide. The aim of this day is the appreciation of the language as the the most important tool in preserving the cultural heritage of each people, and the need to cultivate the mother tongues of various world ethnicities, which are part of the cultural treasure of civilization.
Considering the Albanian language on this day, as the mother tongue of Albanians wherever they might be living, we can gladly point out that its status for the past 100 years has been increasing. After being a forbidden language during the Ottoman Invasion it became the official language of Albania after the Declaration of Independence in Nov. 28, 1912. However, it still remained forbidden in some areas of the nation which became part of Greece and Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian Kingdom by violence.
This condition was bettered after the second war world when Albanians of Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro won the right to education in their mother tongue. They opened Albanian speaking schools in all levels, up to the University of Pristina and the Albanian language department of the Skopje University. The 1974 Yugoslav constitution recognized Albanian as the official regional language in Kosovo, and as the parallel official language in Macedonia. After Kosovo was declared independent in 2008, Albanian became its only official language. In Macedonia, the language was a regional language from the ‘80s, until 2018 when the country’s parliament approved Albanian as another official language within its borders.
Beyond these borders, in Montenegro Albanian is a recognized official regional language for the minorities, supported by the government. In Greece however, for the Albanian minorities the language remains unsupported by the government, yet, the children of immigrants can still learn it by their parents. In Italy with the Arberesh people the situation remains the same as in Greece. And in Turkey, which also has a large number of Albanian immigrants, the government doesn’t allow their children to learn Albanian.
The Albanian language has progressed a lot in these past 100 years, especially in its refinement scale. From a language with a few literary variations and two official dialects (toske in south, and gege in the north), from 1972 its has elevated on the national literary levels, accepted from all the territories of the nation. It was the Consulate of Pristina, which in 1968 took the major step of language unification. Intellectuals united under motto “one nation-one language” declared that Albanians in Yugoslavia would accept only Albanian as their official language.
The Orthography Congress ratified their decision, ending thus a period when Albanian would be written in different variations, and thus a new era with a single national language begins. This Congress has been appraised for its contribution to possess and apply the spoken and written Albanian language in all the country’s legal activities. The Consulate imposed on schools, publishing houses, editorial offices, newspapers, administration, etc., on the Albanian regions within Yugoslavia to start using the Albanian language. In Albania this obligation became obligatory in 1978 under a government decision.
After the post-90s subversion of the mono-partisan political system and the passing in a pluralistic one in Albania, it is noted a lack of care for the language from the government and society. This was followed by a constestation of the literary language with trial to create new ones. In both written and spoken lecturing practices, this situation unfortunately is noticed even nowadays. This is unforgivable as the constitution obliges the protection of the language as a state duty.
A comparison can be made with Macedonia, which follows punishments for those publishing houses, newsrooms or institutions (say) that disrespect the language. Such a law is missing both in Albania and Kosovo, even though a bill is sent for revisal in both parliaments.
As a consequence of this lack of state care, publications, newspapers, magazines, televisions and official documentations hold inexcusable, dramatic violations of literary norms. A more grave violation is the appropriation of foreign words in dictionaries. This has caused a fading of the language, foreign words replacing many beautiful Albanian ones, which might be lost from our collective memory; and that is a pity as our language remains one of the oldest and most unique language in the globe.
In the sphere of spelling there is a massive disuse of the letters “৔ and “à«” which come from the technological chatting applications, but also from a lack of respect for our alphabet, for which our ancestors died to protect. Televisions are now filled with foreign accentology, stressing on the first syllable of the words like in English, whereas the Albanian language model follows an ending accentuation. This has caused a spoiling of phraseology metrics and melody, which sounds more to an Albanian-English-Italian surrogate.
The International Mother Tongue Day was the perfect case to voice to schools, press, and everyone involved in public lecturing to respect our language, which is our most unique distinguishable trait, and what unites us Albanians in one nation.
