Albanian is a macrolanguage spoken by roughly 15 million inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, mainly in Albania, located in Europe’s southeastern corner.
The oldest book to have been written in Albanian is the Meshari, written by the Catholic clergyman Gjon Buzuku in 1555.
It was initially suggested that Albanian was the only surviving member of the
Iliric languages that were traditionally spoken in the southeast of the Balkans. Nonetheless, there is currently stronger evidence that it is related to the ancient Dacian language spoken in Moesia and Dacia. The principal evidence lies in the form of pre-Roman loans in modern Rumanian, presumably having come from Dacian, that are clearly similar to modern Albanian.
Then again, it’s not clear whether the Dacian and Iliric languages belonged to different branches of the Indo-European language family, though most academics tend to think that they were.
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Tags: Albanian, Dacia, Dacian, Gjon Buzuku, Iliric, Indo-European language family, Moesia, pre-Roman
