The regional spread of albanian slavisms and their place in the standard albanian lexicon

Abstract

The Slavic elements of Albanian reflect, among other things, the way the Slavs settled in the Albanian-speaking territories. Field research of Slavic borrowings shows that their geographical spread has a regional character, thus coinciding with the areas of more intensive contacts of Slavic and Albanian populations. These are generally the border areas of the Albanian territory, in which we find a relatively large number of Slavisms, while in the interior areas Slavisms are rarer. Additionally, it is important to note here that the lexical meaning of Albanian Slavisms indicates that this corpus is mostly connected to aspects of rural life in the villages across the border areas. Despite their local and rural character, a significant number of Slavisms have become part of the fund of the common language and the standard Albanian language. Some of these lexemes that have been generalized in the language were originally of a specific dialect. The study of the language of old Gheg Albanian texts helps us to obtain the earliest written evidence of the entry of certain Slavisms into Albanian. By comparing these Slavisms with the state of their dialectal distribution in the territory of Albanian, we can determine the dialectal origin of the spread of a Slavism in other dialects. In this way we can specify the northern Gheg origin of some Slavisms that today are widespread in the territory of Albanian and are part of the standard language. The paper analyses a corpus of several different words of the standard language whose presence in old Albanian texts (XVI-XVII centuries) indicate that they originally belonged to the north Gheg dialect, showing thus the path of the spread of Slavisms in the literary written language up to the standard Albanian language . These results show that the Slavic element of Albanian should not be viewed as being undifferentiated, but based on its specific weight in the Albanian lexicon, with some of it having penetrated in the general use of the language and some being limited in restricted local use.