Linguistic errors or varieties? Albanian and other languages in contact

Albana MUCO

Università degli Studi di Milano

(albana.muco@unimi.it)

Key words: Albanian, Slavic languages, linguistic contact, interference, variety

Albanian language is located in the Balkans (Balkan Sprachbund), the “world’s most famous contact situation” (Alexander 2000:9), namely in a geographical area with many neighbouring languages such as Greek, Macedonian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Bosnian. With some of these languages Albanian has been both in contact and conflict (Jacques 1995, Pani 2006, Muco 2018). The socio-cultural and political environment in which the contact occurred has had an impact over Albanian, that is evident in linguistic phenomena.

According to Weinreich (1979:3), “a full account of interference in a language-contact situation, including the diffusion, persistence, and evanescence of a particular interference phenomenon, is possible only if the extra-linguistic factors are considered”. In this perspective, socio-cultural and political relations between the languages or language communities, the status of the languages in contact, the geographical area are fundamental to analyse the (linguistic) interference. “It is thus in a broad psychological and socio-cultural setting that language contact can be best understood; […]. This involves reference to data not available from ordinary linguistic descriptions and requires the utilization of extra-linguistic techniques (Weinreich 1979:4)”.

On this theoretic basis, the paper focuses on contact-induced linguistic phenomena (Barbour, Stevenson 1998; Dal Negro, Guerini 2007) in the centres of Albanian language: Albania (French, Italian and Greek influence), Kosovo and Macedonia (German and Slavic languages influence) (Lafe 2003, Nesimi 2003, Maksuti 2007, Curtis 2012, Hamiti 2012). Unlike Albania, in the past years, in Macedonia and Kosovo have coexisted different languages with different social status (official language – minority/mother language), that is with different functions/roles and power in the community (Rugova 2015). The process of interaction between the languages in these centres has been conflicting due to identity reasons and ideological factors (group identification, nationalism). Nowadays the linguistic coexistence has taken on a new face in these territories. Consequently, the sociolinguistic approach to linguistic contact is important because it explains linguistic behaviours and phenomena as results/products of the context (Weinreich 1979). Providing examples in Albanian, in the role of recipient language, this article shows that linguistic descriptions need to be sociolinguistic descriptions. In addition, the paper illustrates how contact-induced linguistic phenomena are an important question about the norm-setting issues.

Biographical note

Albana Muco received her BA in Linguistic Mediation (Private University in Perugia, Italy) and her MA – thesis on “German and Albanian as pluricentric languages” – at the University of Turin (Italy). In 2015 she was awarded as a meritorious graduate student. She is currently a PhD student in Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures (German-Albanian Studies) at the University of Milan (Italy). In 2012 she was a selected candidate for the short-term research scholarship at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Her main areas of interest are sociolinguistics, languages and intercultural mediation.