[3] The communist regime in Albania imposed nationwide a standard that was based on the variant of Tosk spoken in and around the city of Korçë.

With the warming of relations between Albania and Yugoslavia starting in the late 1960s, the Kosovo Albanians—the largest ethnic group in Kosovo—adopted the same standard[5] in a process that began in 1968 and culminated with the appearance of the first unified Albanian orthographic handbook and dictionary in 1972.

[7] The standardization has been criticized, notably by the writer Arshi Pipa, who claimed that the move had deprived Albanian of its richness at the expense of the Ghegs.

[8] He referred to literary Albanian as a "monstrosity" produced by the Tosk communist leadership, who had conquered anti-communist northern Albania and imposed their own dialect on the Ghegs.

The first group includes the dialects spoken in the regions of Durrës, Tirana, and sections of Elbasan such as Peqin and the western villages of Krrabë.

The Northeastern Gheg dialectal area begins roughly down from the eastern Montenegrin-Albanian border, including the Albanian districts (Second-level administrative country subdivisions) of Tropojë, Pukë, Has, Mirditë and Kukës; the whole of Kosovo[a], and the municipalities of Bujanovac and Preševo in Serbia.

The Albanian speech in roughly around Skopje, Karadak, and Kumanovo in North Macedonia, is sometimes regarded part of Northeastern Gheg.

[citation needed] In Northeastern Gheg, the palatal stops of standard Albanian, such as [c] (as in qen, "dog") and [ɟ] (as in gjumë, "sleep"), are realised as palato-alveolar affricates, [t͡ʃ] and [d͡ʒ] respectively.

The Northwestern Gheg subdialect encompasses three main Albanian ethnographic regions: Malësia e Madhe, Shkodër and Lezhë.

The different features of this variety can be traced to the historical and geographic isolation of the muntainous region of Malësia e Madhe (Albanian for 'Great Highlands').

[24] The early isolated Malsia Albanian has preserved archaic features of Proto-Albanian and Proto-Indo-European in comparison to other Gheg varieties and to Tosk, such as the word-initial voiceless and voiced stops.