Spoken in the villages of Vaccarizzo Albanese and San Giorgio Albanese in southern Italy by approximately 3,000 people, Vaccarizzo Albanian has retained many archaic features of the Tosk dialect, on which the Standard Albanian is based.
Within Arbëresh along with the subdialects of Macchia, San Cosmo Albanese, San Demetrio Corone, Santa Sofia d'Epiro it belongs to a group of dialects spoken in the region of Cosenza.
[3] The communes of Vaccarizzo Albanese and San Giorgio Albanese were founded by Albanian refugees after the conquest of Albania by the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent mass migration of Albanians to Italy.
However, unlike other Arbëresh dialects, which under southern Italian dialectal influence have undergone a process of partial or total fricativization resulting in the change of the intervocalic voiced velar plosive ([ɡ]) to a voiced velar fricative ([ɣ]), Vaccarizzo Albanian has retained the initial [ɡ].
[5] As Albanian dialects of the Balkans it exhibits doubly articulated consonants; however, unlike in Balkan Tosk dialects, the final unstressed schwa rarely appears in Vaccarizzo.