Until my swearing-in on Dec. 7, I’d been studying Macedonian exclusively. Now I’m studying Albanian, which is the main language of the area where I live and work. It’s a challenge.
There are a number of issues that create challenges. For one thing, I was getting about 16 hours of instruction in Macedonian each week during the 11 weeks of pre-service training. Now I’m getting two hours of instruction a week in Albanian, though it is a bit more intense since I’m the only one in the class.
Another issue is that English is widely spoken here. And I don’t mean that it’s spoken by people who deal with foreigners a lot, such as hotel workers. I mean it’s spoken by supermarket workers. As soon as they hear me try to speak Albanian (or Macedonian if I’m in Skopje), they switch to English. This makes practice difficult.
On the plus side, the alphabet is familiar (although it’s a real pain to remember not to automatically follow “q” with “u”). The only letter shapes that Albanian uses that we don’t use in English are “ë” and “ç.” Albanian also has several letters that look to us like combinations of two letters: “dh,” “gj,” “ll,” “nj,” “rr,” “sh,” “th,” “xh” and “zh.” Albanian treats each of these as a single letter. So if you’re filling in a crossword puzzle, for example, you’d put “SH” in a single square of the puzzle.
People who have studied Spanish might find this familiar because of the letters “ch” and “ll.” My Spanish-English dictionaries have all the words beginning with “ch” after the words that begin with “c” and all the words that begin with “ll” after the words that begin with “l.” But in 2010, the Royal Spanish Academy decided that “ch” and “ll” would be treated as combinations of letters. My dictionaries are from before 2010, so that’s why they don’t recognize the updated alphabet. The current Spanish alphabet has 27 letters – the 26 we use in English, plus “ñ.” That’s a separate letter from “n,” not an n with an accent mark.
(The Royal Spanish Academy is part of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, an international group that establishes norms for the use of Spanish. Most major languages have a language regulator like that, and so do a lot of smaller languages including Albanian and Macedonian. English is highly unusual among major world languages in that we don’t have any such organization to establish norms.)
Albanian grammar is incredibly complex. I’ve been told that I won’t have time in my two years here to get good at the grammar. But I’m hoping I will learn enough of the language to be able to speak understandably, even if ungrammatically.
One man I met recently told me that even though his native language is Albanian, he prefers to write in English because the grammar is so much easier. Yikes.