Current Trends and Issues in Albanian Language Use

Abstract

Language is an instrument for communication and it has the obligation to serve people improving it. But in fact there are moments when language and its rules, decided by a group of people, goes against this purpose, creating so a disorientation between the users and misapprehension of the messages transmitted. In the Orthography of Albanian Language printed in 1973 (p.23) is written “The foreign names has to be written according to the tradition of their use in Albanian taking in consideration the pronunciation in their relative language.” Last 20 years in publications, periodic and visual medias in Albania we can note that the Albanian language is in crossroad between: a rule imposed in a situation of complete isolation and the actual situation of multiple contacts that makes the rule a barrier. Nowadays the same names are written in different forms losing so the correlation with the original and causing a enormous problem not only linguistic but cultural and interpersonal, too. For example referring to high school textbook of literature we will find the names of the American authors as pronounced, in the following forms: Teodor Ruthk, Robert Louell, Xhon Berrimen, Robert Krili, Allen Ginsbergu, Majkell Meklur, Xhek Spicer, Diane Uakoski etc. If an Albanian student would like to prepare a homework and he goes to search in internet information or to find bibliography about these authors, will be impossible to have results, because these names don’t exist in that form. According to the EU and UN norms, the names must be written in respect of the original form. Therefore the Albanian language should reflect social, political and cultural changes of the society, an open society needs an flexible and opened language because as Hudson said “Linguistics ignores the society for its harm”.