Although there is no consensus among scholars about its origin, it is generally believed that the ancestors of Albanian split from Proto-Indo-European about 4,000 years ago. It is spoken by 7.3 million people in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Turkey, and by immigrant communities world-wide. Albania is one of the most polyglot nations in Europe.
The verb system includes many archaic traits, such as the retention of distinct active and middle personal endings (as in Greek) and the change of a stem vowel e in the present to o (from *ē) in the past tense, a feature shared with the Baltic languages. A few brief written records are preserved from the 15th century, the first being a baptismal formula from 1462.

When a definite noun or one taken as already known is the direct object of the sentence, a pronoun in the objective case that repeats this information must also be inserted in the verb phrase; e.g., i-a dhashë librin atij is literally ‘him-it I-gave the-book to-him,’ which in standard English would be ‘I gave the book to him.’ In general, the grammar and formal distinctions of Albanian are reminiscent of Modern Greek and the Romance languages, especially of Romanian. That Albanian is of clearly Indo-European origin was recognized by the German philologist Franz Bopp in 1854; the details of the main correspondences of Albanian with Indo-European languages were elaborated by another German philologist, Gustav Meyer, in the 1880s and ’90s. The links on the left contain English to Albanian translations as well as other tools and info for learning Albanian. Albanian dialects are traditionally divided into two groups: Geg dialects in the north, and Tosk dialects in the south. There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Ol Chiki (Ol Cemet' / Santali), Mro, Coptic, Dialects spoken in Kosovo and Macedonia are Geg dialects, while those spoken in northwestern Greece are Tosk dialects. Albanian is a language of the extensive Indo-European family and is thus related to a certain degree to almost all other languages of Europe. eval(ez_write_tag([[336,280],'omniglot_com-box-4','ezslot_3',122,'0','0'])); Të gjithë njerëzit lindin të lirë dhe CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (, "Constitution of the Republic of Albania". Oscan,

The English speakers were mostly young people, the knowledge of Italian is stable in every age group, while there is a decrease of the speakers of Greek in the youngest group. Albanian forms a separate branch of Indo-European and cannot conclusively be closely connected with any other Indo-European language. While reports of over 90 percent of Albanian's lexicon being composed of foreign words are definitely overstated, lexical borrowing has had an enormous effect on Albanian.