The Albanian language - quality translations by our translation service

The Albanian language (Gjuha Shqipe) belongs to the Indo-European language family and is spoken in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, and also partly in Romania, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. There are an estimated 7.5 million native speakers and it is also the official language of Albania and Kosovo. There are two large dialect groups of the Albanian language: Gheg in the North and Tosk in the South. We always take these differences into consideration in our translations. Simply contact us if you need for your text to be localized. As an example, this could be the case with marketing documents. We also translate other subject areas for you quickly and professionally. Do you have questions about our services? We are happy to assist you over the phone. If you would like to receive an individual and free quote, just send us your text by email and you will receive an email back with the information details as quickly as possible.

The history of the Albanian language

Whether or not Albanian evolved from the tribal language of the Illyrians living in ancient times in the region is controversial among scientists because no written evidence of this language exists. The Albanians, an isolated group of people with their own language, have only been known since the eleventh century AD. At that time, they lived in the remote mountain regions in the north of modern Albania and then spread to the South, East, and Adriatic Coast over the course of the following centuries. In these times, their language mixed partly with Greek and the South Slavic languages as they traveled. The first written records of the Albanian language are from the fifteenth century and the oldest known book printed in Albanian, the Meshari (the Missal), dates back to 1555. During this time, Albanian was not only known to be written in Latin, but also Greek and even Arabic in some cases. This did not change until 1908. A congress of Albanian intellectuals decided that written Albanian in the future should be written exclusively with Latin letters. Also, the participants agreed upon a completely phonetic spelling system. All speech sounds that could not be represented by the Latin alphabet were expressed with letter combinations. The only exceptions were the characters Ç and Ë. There were still two Albanian languages built upon the two main dialects and it was not until 1978 that a standardized single written language was formed out of both.

Special characteristics of the Albanian language - our translators are well-versed in these...

Albanian is not just Albanian. In order to translate a text into or from Albanian, you have to be familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the language. The Gheg dialect is spoken in Northwest and Central Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia. Tosk is spoken in southern Albania, the Albanian Adriatic region, in Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, and even Italy. The two dialects are quite different from each other. Although Albanians can understand each other’s dialects well, there are many phonetic, morphological, and lexical differences. The structure of Albanian grammar is comparable to that of Greek and Romanian, but there are also similarities to the grammar of South Slavic languages. Nouns are either masculine or feminine; there is no neutral gender. There are also two base forms for nouns: the definite and the indefinite form. It’s quite difficult to understand how to pluralize Albanian nouns. There are close to a hundred different arrangements to form the plural. The adjectives are placed differently than in English in that they are normally placed behind the noun being modified; many adjectives take no article. Since we exclusively work with native speaking translators, your translations will always be done accurately and with the specific characteristics of the language in mind. Our translators have been raised speaking the target language and have mastered it down to the smallest detail. Experience our services for yourself and contact us today by telephone or by email. We look forward to hearing from you!