THE ALBANIAN LANGUAGE QUESTION: CONTEXTS AND PRIORITIES

Alexander Vezenkov

In the perspective of Balkan history, the Albanian language question remains somewhat overshadowed by the problems involving more widely used languages (like Turkish or Greek) or linguistic branches (such as the Slavic or Romance languages) in the region. Furthermore, Albania-related topics are often underrepresented in Balkan studies and were even less represented in the past. For that very reason here I will try to give due attention to the Albanian case, of course, seen in a larger perspective. On the one hand, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Albanian history, problems related to language had an extremely important role and were examined in numerous studies by Albanian and foreign scholars.1 On the other hand, I think the Albanian case could be a convincing example, demonstrating to what extent the language policies in the region were interconnected and mutually influenced each other. I will address the topic as an “outsider”—both a non-linguist and non-Albanian. This posi- tion carries obvious limitations but at the same time allows one to grasp the importance of the Albanian language question in the wider context of Balkan history, beyond the parochial borders of a strictly national his- tory and/or a purely linguistic debate. At the same time major decisions in language policy depended not only on the knowledge of experts but also on national and political considerations, some of them influenced by developments well beyond the Albanian-speaking community(-ies). To a certain extent the Albanian case also represents a greater chal- lenge if one wants to examine possible entanglements with other lan- guage policies. Albanian has no close affiliation to other languages and occupies a branch all its own among Indo-European languages, while its standardization took place mostly during the country’s self-isolation in the communist era. I will try to demonstrate that even for Albanian there are important interconnections and interplays, and that this case reflects

1 A bibliography of works in Albanian: Ibrahim Goçi, “Bibliografi e veprave të gjuhësisë (1967/2006),” Gjurmime Albanologjike. Seria e shkencave filologjike 37 (2007), 315–322. 490 alexander vezenkov some more general issues concerning the language problems in the Bal- kans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Albanian language question differs in several ways from that of other Balkan languages, due mainly to its relatively late development as a written language. First of all, during the nineteenth century and the begin- ning of the twentieth, there were heated debates among Albanian intel- lectual and political leaders over the choice of an alphabet. They had to choose among several different alphabets that were already being used by some Albanian clerics and intellectuals—Greek, Latin, Arabic (some even proposed Cyrillic), as well as several “original” Albanian alphabets. For other Balkan languages either there were no doubts concerning the alphabet (Greek), or else the question was whether to replace the existing alphabet with a new one based on Latin script (Romanian, 1840s–1862; Turkish, 1928). Other language reforms led to the introduction and/or abandonment of only a few letters of the alphabet (Serbian, 1818, officially 1868; Bulgarian, 1899, 1945; Macedonian, 1945; Romanian [temporarily], 1953–1993) or diacritic marks from the alphabet (two of the three accents and the breathing marks in Greek, 1982). Secondly, in contrast with the Turkish and especially the Greek lan- guage question (but also for a certain period in the Serbian and Bulgarian case) the debates over the simplification of the official norm or its replace- ment with another one based on the spoken language were unthinkable in the Albanian case. Here the opposition between the official norm and the spoken language was of a different nature—the imposition of a delib- erately created standard on the basis of one of the dialects over the others. In fact this problem dominated the Serbian/Serbo-Croatian and the Bul- garian cases, but in the Albanian language question its central place was unchallenged. The problem was deciding which of the existing dialects should be taken as a basis for the literary language. Virtually all scholars point to the crucial role of the language in the formation of Albanians’ modern national identity, given that they also belong(ed) to several different religious communities—Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic. In this situation the language turned out to be the key unifying element. In addition the language was widely used to underline the uniqueness of the Albanians as a nation. An Indo-European language, Albanian forms a branch of its own; in practice that made delimitation vis-à-vis the neighbors—Greeks and Slavs—an easy task. Finally, as with Romanian, but more persistently, attempts were made to use the language history as at least a partial substitute for the lack of