It gathered major personalities of Albanian literature and writing of the time, and was formed with the aim of defining a fixed literary standard and orthographic rules for the Albanian language which were lacking at the time, in order to encourage the publication of schooltexts.

The commission started officially on 1 September 1916 with the initiative of the Austrian diplomat August Ritter von Kral.

[1] The members agreed on the necessity of having an orthography standard "as phonetic as possible" and a unified literary language which would preserve what the Albanian dialects had in common and leave out any stigmatized regional forms.

Moreover, most of the works and translations created during the Albanian National Awakening (1870–1912) and the early 20th century were written in Tosk dialect.

A conference was held in Pristina in 1968, the Linguistic Conference of Pristina (Albanian: Konsulta gjuhësore e Prishtinës), where the literary standard used so far in Albania and based on the Tosk dialect was adopted by ethnic Albanians of Yugoslavia at the expense of the Gheg dialect.