Albanian–Eastern Romance linguistic parallels
Both are part of the Balkan sprachbund but there are certain elements shared only by Albanian and Eastern Romance languages that descended from Common Romanian.
Aside from Latin, and from shared Greek, Slavic and Turkish elements, other characteristics and words are attributed to the Palaeo-Balkan linguistic base.
Forming a separate branch of the Indo-European language family, Albanian is spoken by about 6.5 million people in Albania and the nearby regions in Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia, North Macedonia and Greece.
[5] Two varieties of the Tosk dialect, Arvanitika in Greece and Arbëresh in southern Italy, preserved archaic elements of the language.
Some scholars propose that the Roman province of Dacia Traiana (which existed to the north of the Lower Danube from 106 AD to 271) was included in the Romanians' homeland.
[17][18] Other scholars say that Proto-Romanian descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken in the south-Danubian Roman provinces and the Romanians' ancestors started to settle in most regions of Romania only in the 12th century.
[22] The loss or limited usage of infinitives characterizes all Balkan languages, but Albanian developed a new type after losing the inherited form.
[23] Johann Erich Thunmann, who published Theodore Kavalliotis' Greek–Aromanian–Albanian dictionary in 1774, was the first scholar to notice that Albanian and Aromanian share a number of elements of their vocabulary.
A common feature between Albanian and Eastern Romance (Aromanian and Old Romanian) is a distinction between simple r (tap r - ɾ) and intense r (trill r - r).
These notably include the centralization of /a/ before nasals, rhotacism of intervocalic /n/ (regular in Tosk, limited to some varieties in Romanian: see lamina > lamura).
It has been pointed out that /n/ rhotacism is present in other Romance languages such as Franco-Provençal, therefore this sound change is not necessarily a unique similarity between Albanian and Romanian.
[31] When comparing the morphological elements of the four core languages of the Balkan linguistic area, scholars have concluded that Albanian and Eastern Romance share most common features.
[37][38] Fine argues that the critical area of Albanian–Romanian contact was the valley of the river Great Morava in what is now eastern Serbia, before the Slavic invasions.
