Origin of the Albanians

[16][15] The usage of the old endonym Arbënesh/Arbëresh, however, persisted and was retained by Albanian communities which had migrated from Albania and adjacent areas centuries before the change of the self-designation, namely the Arbëreshë of Italy, the Arvanites of Greece as well as the Arbanasi in Croatia.

The previous populations – during the process of assimilation by the immigrating IE tribes – have played an important part in the formation of the various ethnic groups generated by their long symbiosis.

The existence of written Albanian is explicitly mentioned in a letter attested from 1332, and the first preserved books, including both those in Gheg and in Tosk, share orthographic features that indicate that some form of common literary language had developed.

In the absence of prior data on the language, scholars have used Albanian linguistic contacts with Ancient Greek, Latin and Slavic for identifying its historical location.

[89] The evidence from loanwords allows linguists to construct in great detail the shape of Albanian native words at the points of major influxes of loans from well-attested languages.

[102] Regarding forests, words for most conifers and shrubs are native, as are the terms for "alder", "elm", "oak", "beech", and "linden", while "ash", "chestnut", "birch", "maple", "poplar", and "willow" are loans.

The Albanian original lexical items directly inherited from Proto-Indo-European are far fewer in comparison to the loanwords, though loans are considered to be "perfectly integrated" and not distinguishable from native vocabulary on a synchronic level.

[108] While the words for plants and animals characteristic of mountainous regions are entirely original, the names for fish and for agricultural activities are often assumed to have been borrowed from other languages.

However, considering the presence of some preserved old terms related to the sea fauna, some have proposed that this vocabulary might have been lost in the course of time after proto-Albanian tribes were pushed back into the inland during invasions.

[118] Witczak (2016) specifically points to seven words recorded by the Greek grammarian Hesychius of Alexandria (5th century AD), and particularly to the term ἀάνθα 'a kind of earring', which was first attested in the work of the choral lyric poet Alcman (fl.

The earliest Greek loans began to enter Albanian circa 600 BC, and are of Doric provenance, tending to refer to vegetables, fruits, spices, animals and tools.

Long-standing contact between Slavs and Albanians might have been common in mountain passages and agriculture or fishing areas, in particular in the valleys of the White and Black branches of the Drin and around the Shkodër and Ohrid lakes.

In some regions, Madgearu concludes that it has been shown that in some areas a Latinate population that survived until at least the seventh century passed on local place names that had mixed characteristics of Eastern and Western Romance into Albanian.

[156][157] It consists of settlements usually built below hillforts along the Lezhë (Praevalitana)-Dardania and Via Egnatia road networks which connected the Adriatic coastline with the central Balkan Roman provinces.

[162] What was established in this early phase of research was that Komani-Kruja settlements represented a local, non-Slavic population which has been described as Romanized Illyrian, Latin-speaking or Latin-literate.

[180][181] The conceptual paucity of the label 'Illyrian' makes its usage uncomfortable to some scholars, for this reason in current research some call the Albanian's ancestor 'Albanoid' in reference to a "specific ethnolinguistically pertinent and historically compact language group", which still remains relatable with Messapic.

[187] The very first recorded mention of a connection between Illyrians and Albanians is in 1709, attributed to the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, most famous for being the co-inventor of calculus along with Isaac Newton.

[214] The cognates include Messapic aran and Albanian arë ("field"), biliā and bijë ("daughter"), menza- (in the name Manzanas) and mëz ("foal"), brendion (in Brundisium) and bri (horn) .

[225] German historian Gottfried Schramm speculated that the Albanians derived from the Christianized Bessi, after their remnants were allegedly pushed by Slavs and Bulgars during the 9th century westwards into today Albania.

[232] Cities whose names follow Albanian phonetic laws – such as Shtip (Štip), Shkupi (Skopje) and Nish (Niš) – lie in the areas, believed to historically been inhabited by Thracians, Paionians and Dardani; the latter is most often considered an Illyrian tribe by ancient historians.

[125] According to historian John Van Antwerp Fine, who does define "Albanians" in his glossary as "an Indo-European people, probably descended from the ancient Illyrians",[238] nevertheless states that "these are serious (non-chauvinistic) arguments that cannot be summarily dismissed.

[264] This study was during excavations of some human fossil bones of 20 individuals dating about 3200–4100 years, from the Bronze Age, belonging to some cultures such as Tei, Monteoru and Noua were found in graves from some necropoles SE of Romania, namely in Zimnicea, Smeeni, Candesti, Cioinagi-Balintesti, Gradistea-Coslogeni and Sultana-Malu Rosu; and the human fossil bones and teeth of 27 individuals from the early Iron Age, dating from the 10th to 7th centuries BC from the Hallstatt Era (the Babadag culture), were found extremely SE of Romania near the Black Sea coast, in some settlements from Dobruja, namely: Jurilovca, Satu Nou, Babadag, Niculitel and Enisala-Palanca.

They found that Albanians, on the one hand, have a high amount of identity by descent sharing, suggesting that Albanian-speakers derived from a relatively small population that expanded recently and rapidly in the last 1,500 years.

On the other hand, they are not wholly isolated or endogamous because Greek and Macedonian samples shared much higher numbers of common ancestors with Albanian speakers than with other neighbors, possibly a result of historical migrations, or else perhaps smaller effects of the Slavic expansion in these populations.

Unfortunately, the people who had once been our allies and who possessed the same rights as citizens and the same religion, i.e. the Albanians and the Latins, who live in the Italian regions of our Empire beyond Western Rome, quite suddenly became enemies when Michael Dokeianos insanely directed his command against their leaders..."[268] One of the earliest theories on the origins of the Albanians, now considered obsolete, incorrectly identified the proto-Albanians with an area of the eastern Caucasus, separately referred to by classical geographers as Caucasian Albania, located in what roughly corresponds to modern-day southern Dagestan, northern Azerbaijan and bordering Caucasian Iberia to its west.

This theory conflated the two Albanias supposing that the ancestors of the Balkan Albanians (Shqiptarët) had migrated westward in the late classical or early medieval period.

[275] In contemporary times with the Arvanite revival of the Pelasgian theory, it has also been recently borrowed by other Albanian speaking populations within and from Albania in Greece to counter the negative image of their communities.

[276] In the late 19th and early 20th century Romanian linguist Hasdeu speculated the origin of Albanians from the free Dacians (i.e., according to him, the Costoboci, the Carpi and the Bessi), after their alleged migration southwards from outside the Danubian or Carpathian limes during Roman Imperial times.

Despite having a history background, he made claims in the field of philology and comparative linguistics, eager to prove the autochthony of the Romanian people in their present-day heartlands (mainly north of the Danube and in Transylvania).

In the foreign languages, the Middle Ages denominations of these names survived, but for the Albanians they were substituted by shqiptarë, Shqipëri and shqipe... Shqip spread out from the north to the south, and Shqipni/Shqipëri is probably a collective noun, following the common pattern of Arbëni, Arbëri.