Classification

Albanian was proved to be an Indo-European language in 1854 by the German philologist Franz Bopp. The Albanian language constitutes its own branch of the Indo-European language family.
Some scholars believe that Albanian derives from Illyrian[2][3]while others,[4] claim that it derives from Daco-Thracian. (Illyrian and Daco-Thracian, however, may have formed a sprachbund, see Thraco-Illyrian.)
Establishing longer relations, Albanian is often compared to Balto-Slavic on the one hand and Germanic on the other, both of which share a number of isoglosses with Albanian. Moreover, Albanian has undergone a vowel shift in which stressed, long o has fallen to a, much like in the former and opposite the latter. Likewise, Albanian has taken the old relative jos and innovatively used it exclusively to qualify adjectives, much in the way Balto-Slavic has used this word to provide the definite ending of adjectives.

[edit] Comparison with other Indo-European languages

Albanian language

Albanian (Gjuha shqipe pronounced [ˈɟuha ˈʃcipɛ]) is an Indo-European language spoken by nearly 6 million people,[1] primarily in Albania and Serbia, but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including the west of Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Serbia. Albanian is also spoken by communities in Greece, along the eastern coast of southern Italy, and on the island of Sicily. Additionally, speakers of Albanian can be found elsewhere throughout the latter two countries resulting from a modern diaspora, originating from the Balkans, that also includes Scandinavia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Low Countries, Turkey and the United States

Thousands of Albanian students gathered in Tirana today for the second day of a strike organized to demand economic change and the resignation of the Communist Government, an opposition party spokesman said.
The spokesman, Genc Polo of the seven-week-old Democratic Party, said about 8,000 students, shouting "Down with the dictatorship!" and "Resign!" thronged a square on the university campus in Tirana for a meeting that lasted more than two hours.
"The organizers read their demands, which are particularly about the economy and living conditions at the campus, which are bad, and they added that if the Government were not able to fulfill them it should resign," Mr. Polo said by telephone from Tirana, the Albanian capital.
Mr. Polo said the meeting ended with songs composed from works by President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, a former dissident, and Ismail Kadare, the exiled Albanian dissident.
Later a group of students presented a letter with their demands to the Government, Mr. Polo said.
On Wednesday students at an agricultural college outside the capital began boycotting classes to protest the backwardness of the country's economy and to demand the resignation of the Government.
The strike spread to the main university campus in Tirana, where thousands of students were reported to have taken part in an open-air rally in support of the demands.
Mr. Polo said both rallies had been peaceful and few police were present. Protests Have Forged Changes
Albania, Europe's last hard-line Communist nation, has been swept by change since student protests in December.
President Ramiz Alia, slowly dismantling the wall of isolation built by his predecessor, Enver Hoxha, bowed to those protests and allowed opposition parties.
The Democratic Party, which estimates its membership as 60,000, will challenge the Communist Party, which is twice its size, in multiparty elections on March 31.