Albanian and the Romance language family : an empirical typological study of similarities and divergences

Details

Supervisors

Degand, Liesbeth

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en linguistique, à finalité spécialisée: Linguistics and its Applications for a Multilingual Society

Abstract

Albanian is the oldest language that is still used today (Science, 2023). Until the 19th century, Albanian was considered to be a semi-Romance language by linguists (Blakqori, 2016). This MA thesis aims to bring light first to the reasons why it was not the case anymore. In the framework of his study “Essai de classification fonctionnelle des langues romanes”, Gawelko (2001) concretely suggested to classify Romance languages according to their synthetic/analytic level thanks to functional criteria : lexical and syntactic ones. Confronting Albanian and some Romance languages on the basis of the same criteria enabled to highlight the fact that the similarities that Albanian shares with Romance languages are in fact superficial, except with Romanian. Albanian, which is constituted of two dialects (Gheg and Tosk), is officially classified as an Indo-European language belonging to an isolated branch today. It was attested, however, that it does not share a filiation link with the other Indo-European languages. Furthermore, a high number of studies was conducted on the Tosk dialect, which was established as the national literary version of Albanian. This political decision was made by a despotic leader. Given that few research was conducted on Gheg due to communism and/or a lack of knowledge, extensive research could be carried on this ancient and unique language. In fine, several arguments in favour of the pre-Hellenic origin of Albanians and the Pelasgic origin of Albanian are advanced.