Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of English on the Albanian language, a language contact phenomenon hitherto largely unexamined by Albanian and non-Albanian linguists alike. This contact mainly started as an indirect one at the beginning of the twentieth century, primarily via translations, the establishment of several educational institutions with the support of American and British associations and Albanian immigration into English-speaking countries. Several newspapers introduced a considerable number of Anglicisms into Albanian during the first half of the twentieth century, a good quantity of which “survived” even during the communist years of isolation. Those Anglicisms which made their way into the Albanian language until the 1990s and which have established themselves in the Albanian of today are mainly from the domains of culture and sports. The fall of the communist regime exposed the Albanian language to external linguistic and social factors, bringing about a flood of Anglicisms in different lexical fields other than culture and sport, such as business, information technology, politics, and medicine. The current database of Anglicisms in Albanian used for the purpose of this Brief Research Report was collected in the framework of the GLAD (Global Anglicism Database Network) project,http://gladnetwork.org. It includes 1,895 Anglicisms from newspapers and dictionaries, all integrated in a single file. The report first provides background information regarding the growing impact of English on the Albanian language during the three time periods under review (early twentieth century until 1960, 1960 to 1990, and 1990 to the present day). This is followed by an account of the data and the methods applied in the research. Subsequently, the findings and results are presented and discussed from a morphological, lexical, and syntactical perspective. The final outcomes are then used as a basis for the identification of Albanian language structures or patterns the English borrowings have managed to penetrate as well as of the level of adaptation English borrowings have in Albanian.
Highlights
The objectives of this brief research report are to provide evidence of how English has had an impact on Albanian from the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as to give an overview of the taxonomy of Anglicisms in the Albanian language.For this purpose, the report focuses on English loanwords in the Albanian language
The main references used to determine the inclusion vs. exclusion of particular English borrowings/Anglicisms are the Etymological Dictionary of the Albanian Language by Kolec Topalli (2017), the four Albanian language dictionaries published by the Albanian Academy of Science (Cipo et al, 1954; Academy of Science of Albania, 1980, 1984, 2006), Manfred Görlach’s Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach, 2001) and Gaetano Rando’s Dizzionario degli Anglicismi nell’ Italiano Postunitario (Rando, 1987)
A second subsection provides an analysis of the types of English borrowings in the Albanian language
Summary
The objectives of this brief research report are to provide evidence of how English has had an impact on Albanian from the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as to give an overview of the taxonomy of Anglicisms in the Albanian language. For this purpose, the report focuses on English loanwords in the Albanian language. Among several other factors that contributed to this indirect language contact are the immigration of many Albanians into Englishspeaking countries such as Canada, the United States, England, or Australia and the establishment of several associations or cultural/sports clubs
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