Albanian Alphabet Day – Dan Robrish

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in an Albanian-speaking area of the country. So far, all my language classes have been in Macedonian, which presents some challenges. For one thing, I don’t get practice in the language I’m studying; for another thing, I have trouble understanding the words spoken around me when I go out.

I wanted to learn more about the local culture. So this evening, (Tuesday, Nov. 22), I went to the commemoration of Albanian Alphabet Day at the Palace of Culture in downtown Tetovo. I went there with a member of my resource family and with another Peace Corps trainee who was part of the previous cohort that was evacuated for COVID-19.

There were a number of speeches given. I was able to understand a few words that sounded similar enough to the English words “congress,” “professors” and “Latin alphabet” that I was confident they meant those things; my companions confirmed this.

Yes, photographer friends, these photos are no good. I was shooting with a cellphone from a balcony across a large theater.

There were also a number of music and dance performances. Although I could not understand the lyrics, I found the performances to be quite entertaining. The dances in traditional Albanian attire were fun to watch. I look forward to attending next year’s events for Alphabet Day; by then I will have studied Albanian for long enough to understand a lot more.

Before the performance, I had read a little bit about what the event commemorates: an early 20^th century meeting in which the Albanian alphabet was standardized. But I knew very little beyond that.

After the performance, I learned more about the significance of Alphabet Day. It turns out that multiple alphabets had been in use to write Albanian. Later checking indicated that some were Latin-based, some were based on Greek letters and some based on Arabic. The Congress of Manastir was called to gather some of the most educated people to come up with standards for the Albanian language. The congress met in Manastir (now Bitola) from Nov. 14 to Nov 22, 1908. They chose a Latin-based alphabet to align more closely with the dominant alphabet of Europe and came up with diacritic marks for the Albanian language.