Proto-Albanian is the ancestral reconstructed language of Albanian, before the Gheg–Tosk dialectal diversification (before ). Albanoid and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region. Whether descendants or sister languages of what was called Illyrian by classical sources, Albanian and Messapic, on the basis of shared features and innovations, are grouped together in a common branch in the current phylogenetic classification of the Indo-European language family.; ; ; ; ; ; . The precursor of Albanian can be considered a completely formed independent IE language since at least the first millennium BCE, with the beginning of the early Proto-Albanian phase.
Proto-Albanian is reconstructed by way of the comparative method between the Tosk and Gheg dialects and between Albanian and other Indo-European languages, as well as through contact linguistics studying early loanwords from and into Albanian and structural and phonological convergences with other languages. Loanwords into Albanian treated through its phonetic evolution can be traced back as early as the first contacts with Doric Greek (West Greek) since the 7th century BCE, but the most important of which are those from Latin (dated by De Vaan to the period 167 BCE to 400 CE) and from Slavic (dated from 600 CE onward). The evidence from loanwords allows linguists to construct in great detail the shape of native words at the points of major influxes of loans from well-attested languages.
In historical linguistics Proto-Albanian is broken up into different stages which are usually delimited by the onset of contact with different well-attested languages. Pre-Proto-Albanian is the early stage of the precursor of Albanian during the first millennium BCE, marked by contacts with Ancient Greek, but not yet by contacts with Latin. Proto-Albanian proper is dated to the period of contacts with Latin, starting from the 2nd century BCE after the Roman conquest of the Western Balkans, but the major Latin influence occurred since the first years of the common era when the Western Balkans were eventually incorporated into the Roman Empire. Common Albanian or its two dialects, Proto-Gheg and Proto-Tosk, experienced the earliest contacts with South Slavic languages since the Slavic migrations to the Balkans in the 6th–7th centuries CE. The rise of Tosk from Proto-Albanian was prompted before Slavic contacts circa 600 CE, as evidenced by the fact that Latin and ancient Greek loanwords are treated like native words with regard to taxonomical differences between Gheg and Tosk, but the same is not true of Slavic loans.: "The dialectal split into Gheg and Tosk happened sometime after the region become Christianized in the fourth century AD; Christian Latin loanwords show Tosk rhotacism, such as Tosk murgu "monk" (Geg mungu) from Lat. monachus.": "The Greek and Latin loans have undergone most of the far-reaching phonological changes which have so altered the shape of inherited words while Slavic and Turkish words do not show those changes. Thus Albanian must have acquired much of its present form by the time Slavs entered into Balkans in the fifth and sixth centuries AD": "In Tosk /a/ before a nasal has become a central vowel (shwa), and intervocalic /n/ has become /r/. These two sound changes have affected only the pre-Slav stratum of the Albanian lexicon, that is the native words and loanwords from Greek and Latin"
History
Albanoid and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region about 3000 to 2500 BCE. They replaced the pre-Indo-European languages, which left traces of the Mediterranean-Balkan substratum. Shortly after they had diverged from one another, Pre-Albanian, Pre-Greek, and Pre-Armenian underwent a longer period of contact, as shown by common correspondences that are irregular for other IE languages. Furthermore, intense Greek–Albanian contacts have continued thereafter.
The precursor of Albanian can be considered a completely formed independent IE language since at least the first millennium BCE, with the beginning of the early Proto-Albanian phase. The precursor of Albanian is often thought to have been an Illyrian language for obvious geographic and historical reasons as well as for some linguistic evidence, or otherwise an unmentioned Balkan Indo-European language that was closely related to Illyrian and Messapic.; ; . Messapic, which is grouped in the same IE branch of Albanian, developed in southeast Italy after crossing the Adriatic Sea at least since the Early Iron Age, being attested in about six hundred inscriptions from Iron Age Apulia.; ; . Paul Kretschmer had grouped Albanian into an "Illyrian" group together with Messapic and considered them satem.
In classical antiquity Proto-Albanian was spoken in the central-western part of the Balkan Peninsula, to the north and west of the Ancient Greeks, as shown by early Doric Greek (West Greek) and Ancient Macedonian loanwords that were treated with characteristic Albanian features, by classical place names exclusively observing Albanian accent and phonetic rules, as well as by several Proto-Albanian items preserved in ancient glossaries.; ; .
Contacts with Ancient Greek Proto-Albanian speech came into contact in its earlier stage with Ancient Greek since the 7th century BCE, when the Greek colonies were founded on the Adriatic coast of Albania. In that period early loanwords were borrowed from Doric Greek (West Greek), either directly from the colonists or indirectly through trade communication in the hinterland.; ; . During the 5th–4th centuries BCE Proto-Albanian directly loaned words from Ancient Macedonian, at a time when this language gained prominence in the region and was not yet replaced by Koine Greek.; . Several Proto-Albanian terms have been preserved in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria and other ancient glossaries.; ; ; . Some of the Proto-Albanian glosses in Hesychius are considered to have been loaned to the Doric Greek as early as the 7th century BCE.
Evidence of a significant level of early linguistic contact between Albanian and Greek is provided by ancient common structural innovations and phonologic convergence such as: the rise of the close front rounded vowel (documented in Attic and Koine Greek); the rise of dental fricatives; the voicing of voiceless plosives after nasal consonants; the replacement, with a form that featured a prefix, of the inherited present tense 3rd person singular of the verb "be" (documented in Koine Greek). Those innovations are limited only to the Albanian and Greek languages and are not shared with other languages of the Balkan sprachbund. Since they precede the Balkan sprachbund era, those innovations date to a prehistoric phase of the Albanian language, spoken at that time in the same area as Greek and within a social frame of bilingualism among early Albanians having to be able to speak some form of Greek.
Contacts with Latin, Romance, and Middle Greek
Proto-Albanian is believed to have come into contact with Latin since the Illyro–Roman wars in the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries BCE, when the Roman Republic defeated the Illyrians and began to establish its rule in the Western Balkans, gradually consolidating its dominion during the last two centuries BCE. However, most of the Latin influence in Proto-Albanian occurred since the beginning of the common era, when the Western Balkans were eventually incorporated into the Roman Empire after the Great Illyrian Revolt of 6–9 CE (Bellum Batonianum).; ; ; ; ; ; ; .
Vladimir I. Georgiev proposed that the name of the city Niš in the region of Dardania evolved according to Albanian phonetic laws (from Naissos to Nish). He argued that ancient Dardania was inhabited by Albanians, making it the territory where the historical Albanian–Romanian language contact occurred. Specifically, Georgiev believed that between the 4th and 6th centuries AD, both proto-Albanian and proto-Romanian developed within the same geographic area—the central–northern Balkan region between the modern cities of Niš, Štip, Skopje, and Sofia.Vladimir I. Georgiev (1981). Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Languages. Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. p.142. Similar theories of a proto-Albanian location in antiquity in Dardania-Moesia was also supported by a number of linguists including Norbert Jokl, Gustav Weigand, Petrovic, Nicolaas van Wijk, Willem Vermeer and Henrik Barić.Popullsia Shqiptare e Kosoves Gjate Shekujve XV XVI, Selami Pulaha p. 11-13: Among other factors, the ancient toponomastic data, such as the contemporary names of places used by Slavs, which are explainable only through the phonetic rules of the ancient Albanian language, has convinced scientists that these territories were inhabited by Albanians. Distinguished linguists such as Norbert Jokl, Gustav Weygand and Petrovici, and even some Yugoslav scholars like Henrik Baric and others, have argued that it was precisely the Dardania, defined as an enclave by the use of the ancient names such as Nish, Shkup, Shtip that was one of the centers of the formation of the Albanian people.
Although sometimes he tends to overestimate the role played by the Roman-Romanian population in the Balkans, Petrovici has affirmed that “the population found by the Slavs in the Eastern region of contemporary Serbia was not Romanized.” One of the arguments brought by Petrovici to support his theory are the contemporary names of the cities mentioned above. Linguists like Van Wejk have concluded that according to the toponymical arguments, the separation of the Serbs and Bulgarians from a non-Slavic population in the early Middle Ages, could be explained only with the presence of the Albanian population in these areas. According to him, the presence of a population which had Romanic origins belonged to a later phase of the Slav expansion. Some of these scholars, particularly Henrik Baric, have convincingly demonstrated this through the study of the ancient and medieval onomastic of the Dardania. Examining these ancient toponyms, Baric argues that,
“the phonetic characteristics show that they are ancient names that Southern Slavs have taken through the Albanian language. The reason for making this argument is that in these toponyms we find that the phonetic changes were performed before the arrival of the Southern Slavs in the historic territories of the Albanians.”
According to Walter Breu, the earliest Latin influence in Albanian came from the coastal areas of the Western Balkans when they were Romanized, and does not concern possible contacts with Romanian whose similarities with Albanian had been strongly overestimated in the past. Many Latin-based words in Albanian have the character of indirect Latinisms, as they go back to originally Latin borrowings via Ancient and Medieval Greek. The name Albanian came from the Albanoi, an Illyrian tribe located in north-central Albania and their city Albanopolis, which was located somewhere between the Mat and Shkumbin rivers.1774 Johann Thunmann: On the History and Language of the Albanians and Vlachs The Albanoi might have been mentioned first as Abroi, which may have been a constituent northern tribe of the larger group of the Taulantii; modern scholars place them near the Mat and Drin rivers. According to Eric P. Hamp, Albanian maintained links with both coastal western and central inland Balkan Latin formations. An Albanopolis is also mentioned in Scupi.Plasari, Aurel (2020). "The Albanians in attestations from late antiquity until the early Middle Ages". Albanian Studies. 2 (2). A similar sounding Albanos is mentioned on a funeral inscription from the 2nd/3rd century CE in ancient Stobi, near Gradsko.