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Albanian was proven to be an Indo-European language in 1854 by the German philologist Franz Bopp. The Albanian language is its own independent branch of the Indo-European language family with no living close relatives. There is no scholarly consensus over its origin. Some scholars maintain that it derives from the Illyrian language, and others claim that it derives from Daco-Thracian (Illyrian and Daco-Thracian however might have been closely related languages). This question is often loaded with political implications, but linguistically, the problem is very open; a recent linguist has even stated that Illyrian and Thracian may have been as close as Czech to Slovak (Paliga, 2002).
Albanian has been written with many different alphabets since the 15th century. Originally, the Tosk dialect was written with the Greek alphabet and the Gheg dialect was written with the Latin alphabet. They have both also been written with the Ottoman Turkish version of the Arabic alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and some local alphabets. The modern Albanian alphabet was standardized in 1909, and is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the letters e,c, and nine digraphs.
Albanian Alphabet
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