The Albanian language belongs to the family of Indo-European languages. It is one of the oldest languages, yet different from the others. Albanian language seems to have kept its own features from very ancient times. The earliest text in Albanian known so far is the "Baptizing Formula", written in 1462. Historically, unified national literary Albanian can be traced to 1908, when the decision was made to accept the Latin alphabet. Since 1972, the unified literary language remains the only one used in Albania and Yugoslavia.

Albanian language is spelled more or less phonetically. Each letter has a specific sound that doesn't change in the context, making its reading and writing rather easy. As a rule, Albanian spelling corresponds to the pronunciation of words quite directly. The alphabet has 36  letters, 29 consonants and 7 vowels. There are two main dialects, the Geg dialect in the North of Albania and the Tosk dialect in the South. In spite of the differences of the two main dialects, both spoken and written Albanian are understood by all Albanians. Education and mass media have facilitated this process. Today Albanian is spoken by about 10 million people around the world, 3.5 million in Albania, 3 million in Yugoslavia (Kosovo, Macedonian, Serb and Montenegro), over 1 million in Turkey, as well as large groups of Albanians in South Italy (known as Arbereshe), Greece, Europe, USA, Canada and Australia.

· Albanian is an inflected language, which means that grammatical endings play an indispensable role in the language grammatical system.

· Nouns can have either a feminine or masculine gender (the neutral gender isn’t very common)

· Depending on their role in the sentence (such as subject or object, nouns change their endings. The different roles they play are called cases. Albanian has five cases: Nominative (subject), Accusative (direct object), Dative (indirect object), Genitive (possession) and Ablative (nouns following prepositions).

· Nouns can be either definite or indefinite. This is marked by their ending rather than an article like the English the. Even names of people and places can be definite. The capital Tirana could then be literally translated as the Tiranë.

· Adjectives change depending on the gender, number, definiteness and case of the noun they follow.

· Instead of the pronouns (I work, you work, he she/it works, we work, you work, they work), verbs use endings (punoj, punon, punon, punojmë, punoni, punojnë). The pronouns exist (unë, ti, ai/ajo, ne, ju, ata/ato) but are used only for emphasis.

· Compared to the English 14, Albanian only has 8 tenses whose use is very similar to their English equivalents.

· Another prominent feature or Albanian is its clitics e/i and their forms which have many different functions. One of the language’s functions is the direct object pronoun: Unë e shoh. (I see it.) What may be confusing is that it is used even when the full object is there: Unë e shoh librin. (I see [it] the book.)

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