Proposals for orthography - a starting point for improving the orthography of albanian

Abstract

The language norm is a linguistic response of language planners to the state of language in a certain period of time. But, as a historic category, the language norm has to reflect linguistic changes that happen in the speech acts during a large span of time. Consequently, the intervention of corpus planners of the standard language in order to reply to the new state of language is something not only normal, but also necessary. In order to keep the pace with changes, it is necessary to review periodically the orthographic norm, which reflects changes of phonetic, lexical and grammatical norms. But while these norms change in a normal way, mirroring changes in the speech of a certain period of time, the orthographic norm needs the intervention of language planners. The question here is how and by whom the reviewing of orthographic rules has to be made: based on personal views of a small group of linguists, or based on the proposals for changes of different rules made by Albanian linguists during a 50-year period? In this paper we are of the opinion that the second route has to be followed. The approval of changes of spelling rules has to be made by the community of language researchers, writers and editors based on the proposals. This is quite feasible, because in their hands is the book in two volumes “Proposals on orthography” (2022). To simplify their work, a questionnaire of proposals has to be made with “yes” and “no” questions. Later on, answers to this questionnaire must be filtered out in order to discern proposals that are accepted by 90-100% of the respondents, by 75-89% etc. The percentage that will be as a threshold for intervention in the rules will be decided by a group of planners, but the acceptance of changes has to be made in a conference of the above-mentioned actors.