Linguists gather to discuss standard Albanian

TIRANA, Dec. 15 – Dozens of linguists from Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia discussed the standard Albanian language in a three-day conference held in Durres from 15 to 17 December, an initiative of the Language and Literature Institute of the Centre for Albanological Studies in Tirana. The conference focusing on “Albanian under the current stage; Policies for its improvement and enrichment of standard” came 38 years after the Orthography Congress of 1972 and 20 years after the collapse of the communist regime.
Some scholars still believe the 1972 Congress, which based about eighty percent on the southern Albanian Tosk dialect, was unfair and biased against the northern Geg dialect, the language of many great poets and writers such as Gjergj Fishta, Ndre Mjeda, Migjeni, also because of the fact that late Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha and most communist elite were from southern Albania.
However, the participants’ overall stance was to further enrich and not change the standard Albanian ahead of the globalization era, under which the Albanian language has been suffering from the continuous use of many foreign norms, or expressions considered incorrect or unacceptable.
The modern literary language (gjuha letrare), agreed upon at the Orthography Congress of 20 to 25 November 1972, is a combination of the two dialect groups, though based about eighty percent on Tosk. It is now a widely accepted standard both in Albania and elsewhere, though there have been increasing tendencies in recent years to revive literary Gheg.
The Albanian language (shqip) is spoken by over six million people in the southwestern Balkans, primarily in the Republic of Albania and in the neighbouring countries which once formed part of the Yugoslav federation (Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia). In Albania itself, the language is spoken by the entire population of 3,087,159 inhabitants (census of April 2001), including some bilingual ethnic minorities.