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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 preservation of Proto-Albanian vocabulary and linguistic features in Romanian highlights that at least partly Balkan Latin emerged as Albanian-speakers shifted to Latin. [134] The other layer of linguistic contacts of Albanian with Latin involves Old Dalmatian, a western Balkan derivative of Balkan Latin.
The Albanians (Albanian: Shqiptarët) and their country Albania (Shqipëria) have been identified by many ethnonyms.The native endonym is Shqiptar.The name "Albanians" (Latin: Albanenses/Arbanenses) was used in medieval Greek and Latin documents that gradually entered European languages from which other similar derivative names emerged. [1]
[4] [5] Johann Georg von Hahn (1854) was the first to derive the term Shqiptar from the Albanian verbs shqipoj ("to speak clearly") and shqiptoj ("to speak out, pronounce"), [6] while Gustav Meyer (1891) was the first to derive shqipoj from the Latin verb excipere, denoting people who speak the same language, [6] similar to the ethno-linguistic ...
The pronunciation of "β" changed from /b/ in ancient Greek to /v/ in Byzantine Greek. This is reflected in the Turkish term, Arnavut or Arnaut, by ways of metathesis (-van- to -nav-). [1] [9] [10] A related Greek term is Arvanites. The Ottoman Turks borrowed their name for Albanians after hearing it from the Byzantine Greeks. [9]
Albanian presence in Croatia can be traced back to the beginning of the Late Middle Ages. [155] In this period, there was a significant Albanian community in Ragusa with a number of families of Albanian origin inclusively the Sorgo family who came from the Cape of Rodon in central Albania, across Kotor in eastern Montenegro, to Dalmatia. [156]
Albanoid' is also used to explain Albanian-like pre-Romance features found in Eastern Romance languages. [4] The term 'Albanoid' for the IE subfamily of Albanian was firstly introduced by Indo-European historical linguist Eric Pratt Hamp (1920 – 2019), [11] and thereafter adopted by a series of linguists. [12] A variant term is 'Albanic'. [13]
Early Proto-Albanian's vowel inventory began to change as a result of Latin contact. Initially Albanian was resistant to the restoration of short *o as a separate phoneme, with Latin unstressed *o being replaced by *a, and stressed Latin *o being replaced by *u. However, in later loans, Latin *o is maintained in Albanian as *o.