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The language is spoken by approximately 6 million people in the Balkans, primarily in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. [1] However, due to old communities in Italy and the large Albanian diaspora, the worldwide total of speakers is much higher than in Southern Europe and numbers approximately 7.5 million.
The Article 14 of the Albanian Constitution states that "The official language in the Republic of Albania is Albanian." [2] According to the 2011 population census, 2,765,610, 98.767% of the population declared Albanian as their mother tongue ("mother tongue is defined as the first or main language spoken at home during childhood").
Although research is ongoing, in current phylogenetic tree models of the Indo-European language family, the IE dialect that gave rise to Albanian splits from "Post-Tocharian Indo-European", that is the residual Indo-European unity ("Core Indo-European") which remained after Tocharian's splitting from "Post-Anatolian Indo-European". [20]
Inherited toponyms from a Proto-Albanian language and the date of adoption of non-Albanian toponyms indicate in Albanology the regions were the Albanian language originated, evolved and expanded. Depending on which proposed etymology and phonological development linguists support, different etymologies are usually used to link Albanian to ...
Proto-Albanian is the ancestral reconstructed language of Albanian, before the Gheg–Tosk dialectal diversification (before c. 600 CE). [2] Albanoid and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region.
The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; another nine subdivisions are now extinct.
Classification of Albanian in the Paleo-Balkanic branch as suggested by Brian D. Joseph and Adam Hyllested in "The Indo-European Language Family" (2022) The Arbëresh and Arvanitika dialects of the Albanian language, are spoken by the Arbëreshë and Arvanites in Southern Italy and Southern Greece, respectively.
Most of the major languages belonging to language branches and groups in Europe, and western and southern Asia, belong to the Indo-European language family. This is thus the biggest language family in the world by number of mother tongue speakers (but not by number of languages: by this measure it is only the 3rd or 5th biggest).