A Stanford University Press classic.

Approximately five million people worldwide speak Albanian. The opening of Albania in the 1990s to broader trading and diplomatic relations with other nations has created a need for better knowledge of the language and culture of this country. This book teaches the student to communicate in everyday situations in the language, with each chapter introducing a new situational context. Students learn to discuss work, vacations, health, and entertainment. Students also learn to practice basic skills such as shopping, ordering tickets, and renting an apartment. Upon completing this textbook, students will be at the A2/B1 level of proficiency on the scale provided by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The textbook includes: • eighteen lessons based on real-life situations, including three review lessons • dialogues to help introduce vocabulary and grammatical structures • comprehension questions and exercises • related readings at the end of each chapter • full translations for all examples discussed in grammar sections • a series of appendixes with numerous charts summarizing main classes of nouns, adjectives, and verbs • an appendix with the solutions to most of the exercises in the book • a glossary with all the words in the dialogs and readings.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

In its ninth printing, the Albanian Practical Dictionary is expanded and romanized to include 9,000 entries with simple pronunciation and basic grammatical information. Also includes a transliteration guide, a list of abbreviations, geographical names, and idiomatic expressions.

In some senses, Albania is a living museum of the past. Originally a small herding community in the most inaccessible reaches of the Balkans, the presence of Albanians in southeastern Europe has been documented for over a thousand years. Albanian traditional folk culture, which evolved over centuries of relative isolation, is surprisingly rich. Yet despite recent events this culture remains little known to the Western world. Due to the lasting effects of a half century of Stalinist dictatorship, very few individuals even in Albania know much about their own popular traditions. The Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture makes available for the first time a wealth of knowledge about Albanian popular belief and folk customs. Alphabetical entries shed light on blood feuding, figures of Albanian mythology, religious beliefs, communities, and sects, calendar feasts and rituals, and popular superstitions, as well as birth, marriage, and funeral customs, and sexual mores. This unique volume will stand as the standard reference work on the subject for years to come.

Analysing the post-1990 Albanian migration to Italy, this text is a study of one of Europe's newest, most dramatic yet least understood migrations. It explores the dynamics of this migration and takes a look at migrants' employment, housing and social exclusion in the country, as well as the process of return migration to Albania.

This work, first published in 1985, is an analysis of the syntax of the Albanian verb complex. The term "verb complex" is defined here as the verb stem and its conjugational endings, together with the perfect auxiliaries and verb clitics. In a wider sense the verb includes the verb and its central arguments: subject, direct object, and indirect object. The analysis is presented in a somewhat expanded version of the relational grammar framework of Perlmutter and Postal (1977). It is argued that by assuming the existence of multiple levels in the syntactic structure of a clause, it is possible to account for the distribution of active and non-active verb forms over the various constructions of Albanian with a single generalisation. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.