Albania
The name "Albania" itself comes from an Indo-European term alb for mountains and hills. The term alb may sound familiar due to the English term for what we call the mountains in Switzerland-- The Swiss Alps. The etymology of the country reveals a lot about the origins of its language. Using Grimm's law, linguists may notice that the voiced bilabial stop [b] developed into the voiceless bilabial stop [p] when Germanic languages formed a branch of their own under Indo-European languages. Albanian does not have principles of Grimm's law that may mark it as a Germanic language, which we can detect quite clearly in the differing sounds in Albania and the alps (both of these lexical items referring to mountains). |
We know Albanian isn't a Germanic language, so what is its origin?
(Bouchard, 2016)
Albanian is a unique Proto Indo-European language in that it belongs to a family of its own. Though Albanian is a language of its own and has developed in direct relation to Indo-European, it has been influenced by other languages such as Latin, Greek, and some Slavic languages. According to Orel (2000) lexical terms associated with social organization and geography are most related to Proto Indo-European. There are, however, many lexical borrowings from Latin that pertain to political organization and economic exchange.
PhonologyAlbanian
Maddieson (1984)
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English
Lee (2017)
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Morphology
Both Albanian and English carry similar basic morphological properties. Kurani and Muho (2011) found that noun pluralization in the two languages is similar in that they both "have a regular and irregular plural of nouns" (p. 4).
Nouns pluralized in both languages tend to be irregular.
Kurani and Muho (2011)
SyntaxEnglish and Albanian share the same Subject Verb Object (SVO) word order, although structurally, Albanian is more fluid in word order. According to Hughes (2018) may "deviate from the SVO pattern, such as in indicative sentences."
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Non-verbal CommunicationAlbanian and American culture differ, and therefore contain variability in communication that, due to context, may cause misunderstandings. To compare the languages using non-verbal communication, one example of a misunderstanding may be that in Albania they shake their head no to say "yes" and nod their head yes to say "no". Without prior knowledge of pragmatics an English speaker may visit Albania and run into problems with communication.
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Phonological difficulties in Albanian natives speaking English:
Phonological items:[æ] and [ɛ] are hard for learners to distinguish from one another
[i] and [i:] get confused by Albanian speakers [w] is hard for native Albanian speakers to pronounce |
examples:"man" [mæn] vs "men" [mɛn]
"sheep" [ši:p] vs "ship" [šip] Albanian does not contain a [w] phoneme in their alphabet and often times confuse it with [u] |