Albanian language facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Albanian
shqip, gjuha shqipe, 𐔀𐔐𐔁𐔀𐔓𐔍𐔀𐔔
Native to	Albania, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, Albanian diaspora
Native speakers	5.4 million in the Balkans  (2011)e18
Language family	Indo-European Albanian
Dialects	Gheg Tosk Arbëresh Arvanitika
Writing system	Latin (Albanian alphabet) Albanian Braille
Official status
Official language in	Albania  Kosovo  North Macedonia  Montenegro
Recognised minority language in	Italy  Serbia  Croatia  Romania  Bulgaria
Regulated by	Officially by the Social Sciences and Albanological Section of the Academy of Sciences of Albania
Linguasphere	55-AAA-aaa to 55-AAA-ahe (25 varieties)
The dialects of the Albanian language. (The map does not indicate where the language is majority or minority.)
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

The Albanian language (Shqip) is an Indo-European language. It is spoken mostly in Albania (3,500,000), Kosovo and (500,000) Republic of North Macedonia.

Images for kids

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  Albanian keyboard layout.

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  Albanian within Indo-European language family tree based on "Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis of Indo-European languages" by Chang et al. (January 2015).

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  Illyrians, Dacians, Getae and Thracians at 200 BC

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  1905 issue of the magazine Albania, the most important Albanian periodical of the early 20th century

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  Meshari of Gjon Buzuku 1554–1555

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  Possibly the oldest surviving Albanian text, highlighted in red, from the Bellifortis manuscript, written by Konrad Kyeser around 1402–1405.

See also

In Spanish: Idioma albanés para niños