Albanian

Albanian is the sole surviving language of the Albanic branch of Indo-European, native to the western Balkans and commonly regarded as the descendant of ancient Illyrian. It splits into two mutually intelligible dialects, Gheg north of the Shkumbin river and Tosk to its south, whose division was probably complete by the sixth century.

The language first appears in writing in a Ragusan testimony of 1284; the oldest surviving Albanian text, a baptismal formula, dates to 1462. The first printed book was the Meshari, a Gheg missal published by Gjon Buzuku in 1555, followed by Tosk works from the Arbëresh communities of southern Italy.

Under Ottoman rule northern Catholics wrote in Latin script, southern Orthodox in Greek and Muslims in Arabic, while the language absorbed many Turkish words. Frang Bardhi printed the first Latin-Albanian dictionary in Rome in 1635.