The Albanians of Kosovo (, ), commonly also called Kosovo Albanians, Kosovan Albanians or Kosovar Albanians, are an ethnic Albanian population native to Kosovo and constitute the country's largest ethnic group. They belong to the Gheg dialectal sub-group of Albanians, because they speak Gheg Albanian. According to the 2024 national census by the ASK, Albanians comprise 91.8% of the population in Kosovo.
History
Pre-7th century Toponymical evidence suggests that Albanian was spoken in western and eastern Kosovo and the Niš region before the Migration Period. In this era, Albanian in Kosovo was in linguistic contact with Eastern Romance which was presumably spoken in contemporary eastern Serbia and Macedonia.
Middle Ages Between 1246 and 1255, Stefan Uroš I had reported Albanian toponyms in the Drenica valley. A chrysobull of the Serbian Tsar Stefan Dušan that was given to the Monastery of Saint Mihail and Gavril in Prizren between the years of 1348–1353 states the presence of Albanians in the Plains of Dukagjin, the vicinity of Prizren and in the villages of Drenica. During Stefan Dušan's reign, Albanian Catholics in Kosovo were forcibly converted into Orthodoxy, many others were expelled, and Catholic churches were converted into Orthodox ones.
In the 14th century in two chrysobulls or decrees by Serbian rulers, villages of Albanians alongside Vlachs are cited in the first as being between the White Drin and Lim rivers (1330), and in the second (1348) a total of nine Albanian villages are cited within the vicinity of Prizren.:From the details of the monastic estates given in the chrysobulls, further information can be gleaned about these Vlachs and Albanians. The earliest reference is in one of Nemanja's charters giving property to Hilandar, the Serbian monastery on Mount Athos: 170 Vlachs are mentioned, probably located in villages round Prizren. When Dečanski founded his monastery of Decani in 1330, he referred to 'villages and katuns of Vlachs and Albanians' in the area of the white Drin: a katun (alb.:katund) was a shepherding settlement. And Dusan's chrysobull of 1348 for the Monastery of the Holy Archangels in Prizren mentions a total of nine Albanian katuns. "The monastery at Dečani stands on a terrace commanding passes into High Albania. When Stefan Uros III founded it in 1330, he gave it many villages in the plain and catuns of Vlachs and Albanians between the Lim and the Beli Drim. Vlachs and Albanians had to carry salt for the monastery and provide it with serf labour."
The Albanian villages Ujmir and Gjonaj are mentioned in Serbian scriptures from the 1300s. In Gjonaj stands possibly one of the oldest Catholic churches in Kosovo. Gjonaj is also believed to be the birthplace of Pjetër Bogdani. Other Albanian villages mentioned from the 14th and 15th centuries are Planeje, Zym, Gorozhub, Milaj, Kojushe, Batushe, Mazrek, and Voksh. Based on the anthroponomy in the Ottoman registers from 1452–53, Selami Pulaha considers that the Has region in Kosovo was inhabited by a Christian Albanian population. Villages that were identified in the defters and still exist today include Mazrek, Kojushe, Gorozhub, Zym, Zhur, Milaj, and Planeje. In the 1485 defter, which covered the Gjakova region of Western Kosovo, half of the villages had Albanian names or a mixture of Slavic-Albanian names.
The Ottomans defters of 15th and 16th century also recorded new arrivals into Kosovo and abandoned places. Nothing indicates the area was massively depopulated during this period nor massively settled by another population from outside. Ottoman records from the 15th century show western Kosovo had a large native Albanian population. Further research indicates the towns in Eastern Kosovo had a large Muslim Albanian population prior to the Austrian-Ottoman wars of 1690 and that the towns lost their population considerably due to the wars. During the 18th century and onwards there were also movements of people within these Albanian inhabited territories (Nish, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania).
Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1455 to 1912, at first as part of the eyalet of Rumelia, and from 1864 as a separate province (vilayet). During this time, Islam was introduced to the population. Today, Sunni Islam is the predominant religion of Kosovo Albanians.
The Ottoman term Arnavudluk (آرناوودلق) meaning Albania was used in Ottoman state records for areas such as southern Serbia and Kosovo.Kolovos, Elias (2007). The Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, the Greek lands: toward a social and economic history: studies in honor of John C. Alexander . Isis Press. p. 41. "Anscombe (ibid., 107 n. 3) notes that Ottoman "Albania" or Arnavudluk... included parts of present-day northern Greece, western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, Kosovo, and southern Serbia"; see also El2. s.v. "Arnawutluk. 6. History" (H. İnalcık) and Arsh, He Alvania. 31.33, 39–40. For the Byzantine period. see Psimouli, Souli. 28." Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682) in his travels within the region during 1660 referred to the western and central part of what is today Kosovo as Arnavudluk and described the town of Vushtrri's inhabitants as having knowledge of Albanian or Turkish with few speakers of Slavic languages.Anscombe, Frederic F, (2006). "The Ottoman Empire in Recent International Politics – II: The Case of Kosovo". The International History Review. 28.(4): 767–774, 785–788. "While the ethnic roots of some settlements can be determined from the Ottoman records, Serbian and Albanian historians have at times read too much into them in their running dispute over the ethnic history of early Ottoman Kosovo. Their attempts to use early Ottoman provincial surveys (tahrir defterleri) to gauge the ethnic make—up of the population in the fifteenth century have proved little. Leaving aside questions arising from the dialects and pronunciation of the census scribes, interpreters, and even priests who baptized those recorded, no natural law binds ethnicity to name. Imitation, in which the customs, tastes, and even names of those in the public eye are copied by the less exalted, is a time—tested tradition and one followed in the Ottoman Empire. Some Christian sipahis in early Ottoman Albania took such Turkic names as Timurtaş, for example, in a kind of cultural conformity completed later by conversion to Islam. Such cultural mimicry makes onomastics an inappropriate tool for anyone wishing to use Ottoman records to prove claims so modern as to have been irrelevant to the pre-modern state. The seventeenth-century Ottoman notable arid author Evliya Çelebi, who wrote a massive account of his travels around the empire and abroad, included in it details of local society that normally would not appear in official correspondence; for this reason, his account of a visit to several towns in Kosovo in 1660 is extremely valuable. Evliya confirms that western and at least parts of central Kosovo were 'Arnavud'. He notes that the town of Vushtrri had few speakers of 'Boşnakca'; its inhabitants spoke Albanian or Turkish. He terms the highlands around Tetovo (in Macedonia), Peć, and Prizren the 'mountains of Arnavudluk'. Elsewhere, he states that 'the mountains of Peć' lay in Arnavudluk, from which issued one of the rivers converging at Mitrovica, just north-west of which he sites Kosovo's border with Bosna. This river, the Ibar, flows from a source in the mountains of Montenegro north-north-west of Peć, in the region of Rozaje to which the Këlmendi would later be moved. He names the other river running by Mitrovica as the Kılab and says that it, too, had its source in Aravudluk; by this, he apparently meant the Lab, which today is the name of the river descending from mountains north—east of Mitrovica to join the Sitnica north of Priština. As Evliya travelled south, he appears to have named the entire stretch of river he was following the Kılab, not noting the change of name when he took the right fork at the confluence of the Lab and Sitnica. Thus, Evliya states that the tomb of Murad I, killed in the battle of Kosovo Polje, stood beside the Kılab, although it stands near the Sitnica outside Priština. Despite the confusion of names, Evliya included in Arnavudluk not only the western fringe of Kosovo, but also the central mountains from which the Sitnica ('Kılab') and its first tributaries descend. Given that a large Albanian population lived in Kosovo, especially in the west and centre, both before and after the Habsburg invasion of 1689–90, it remains possible, in theory, that at that time in the Ottoman Empire, one people emigrated en masse and another immigrated to take its place.
Modern period 19th century
A large number of Albanians alongside smaller numbers of urban Turks (with some being of Albanian origin) were expelled and/or fled from what is now contemporary southern Serbia (Toplica and Morava regions) during the Serbian–Ottoman War (1876–78). Many settled in Kosovo, where they and their descendants are known as muhaxhir, also muhaxher ("exiles", from Arabic 'muhajir'), and some bear the surname Muhaxhiri/Muhaxheri or most others the village name of origin.Uka, Sabit (2004). E drejta mbi vatrat dhe pasuritë reale dhe autoktone nuk vjetërohet: të dhëna në formë rezimeje [The rights of homes and assets, real and autochthonous that does not disappear with time: Data given in the form of estate portions regarding inheritance]. Shoqata e Muhaxhirëvë të Kosovës. pp. 52–54. During the late Ottoman period, ethno-national Albanian identity as expressed in contemporary times did not exist amongst the wider Kosovo Albanian-speaking population. Instead collective identities were based upon either socio-professional, socio-economic, regional, or religious identities and sometimes relations between Muslim and Christian Albanians were tense.
As a reaction against the Congress of Berlin, which had given some Albanian-populated territories to Serbia and Montenegro, Albanians, mostly from Kosovo, formed the League of Prizren in Prizren in June 1878 with the goal of uniting Albanian inhabitants in the Ottoman Empire into a single vilayet. The Ottoman state briefly supported the league's claims viewing Albanian nationalism as possibly preventing further territorial losses to newly independent Balkan states. Failing to win their claims on a diplomatic level, Albanians embarked on the route of military conflict with their Balkan neighbors. After three years of war, the Albanians were defeated. Many of the leaders were executed and imprisoned or exiled.
In his 1902 ethnographic study of Kosovo, the Serbian diplomat and writer Branislav Nušić wrote that the Albanians (Arnauts) represented the oldest indigenous population of the region. He described them as direct descendants of the ancient, pre-Roman Illyrian inhabitants who had preserved their language and characteristics due to the isolated nature of their mountainous terrain, adding that the migrating Serbs encountered both Illyrians (Albanians) and Latinized Illyrians (Vlachs) upon their arrival.
In 1909-1910, an Albanian uprising spread from Pristina and lasted until the Ottoman Sultan's visit to Kosovo in June 1911 where he declared amnesty for the insurgents. At that time Serbs consisted about 25% of the whole Vilayet of Kosovo's overall population, and were opposing the Albanian aims along with Turks and other Slavs in Kosovo, which prevented the Albanian movements from establishing their rule over Kosovo.
20th century