by Ερινα Ινα Ελμαζι

Summary

This master’s thesis from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki examines the historical development of Albanian writing systems, focusing on the use of the Greek alphabet. Written by Ioannis Emmanouil Karagiorgakis, it explores how scholars between the 17th and 19th centuries adapted Greek script or created local alphabets to represent Albanian. The study also reviews historical theories about the origins of the Albanian language, including its proposed links to Pelasgian and Greek. It highlights how the absence of a standardized writing system influenced Albanian literary production and reflects broader linguistic and cultural debates in the Balkans.

This is a document of a postgraduate thesis submitted in 2024 to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The thesis is 233 pages long.

Basic information:

The thesis, titled “The Writing Systems of Albanian and the Greek Alphabet,” was written by Karagiorgakis Ioannis Emmanouil under the supervision of Doris K. Kyriazis. It was submitted to the School of Philosophy, Department of Philology, as part of an M.A. in Linguistics with a specialization in Historical and Balkan Linguistics.

Content

The study explores the historical development of Albanian writing systems, with a particular focus on the use of the Greek alphabet. It examines how scholars between the 17th and 19th centuries either adapted the Greek script or created local Albanian alphabets to meet linguistic needs.

The thesis also reviews historical theories about the origin of the Albanian language, including the once widespread belief that it derived from ancient Pelasgian and was closely related to Greek. In addition, it looks at how the absence of a standardized writing system affected Albanian literary production in the pre-modern period.

The full thesis is available in digital form through the university’s institutional repository.

Historical context

The issue of the Arvanites attracted significant attention in 19th-century Greek public discourse. Publications of the time often linked Albanians and Arvanites to Pelasgian origins. For example, the newspaper Pelasgos, published in Lamia, argued in an 1860 issue that Albanians were of “Greco-Pelasgian” origin and not migrants to the Balkans. It even suggested that Albanian speakers represented an ancient Greek tribe.

These publications sometimes included linguistic analysis, such as discussions of Albanian grammar and instructions on how to represent Albanian sounds using the Greek alphabet, occasionally comparing them with Greek and French phonetics.

Another example comes from the Athenian newspaper Fos, which in 1861 published a political text written in Arvanitika without translation—likely assuming readers understood it. The text used Greek letters exclusively, sometimes following Greek spelling conventions and incorporating Greek vocabulary.

At the same time, such publications often reflected negative attitudes toward Arvanitika and its speakers, describing the language as “crude” and its speakers as uneducated—views that were common in parts of the 19th-century press.

Reference

Karagiorgakis, Ioannis Emmanouil. The Writing Systems of Albanian and the Greek Alphabet. Master’s thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2024.