LAST THOUGHTS ON ALBANIAN AND ARBERESHE
LAST THOUGHTS ON ALBANIAN AND ARBERESHE

Summary/Abstract: One of the great debates in the Eighteen and Nineteen Hundreds concerned the question of the validity of the existence of a Balkan ‘Sprachbund’, replacing the earlier substratum theories of Kopitar (1829), Schleicher (1850) and Miklosich (1861, 1870). Without overdisturbing reknowned historical authors such as Meyer, Weigand, or Sandfeld, but taking into reasonable account the numerous contributions of giants in the field such as Çabej, Rosetti and Hamp, one tries to broaden out the field into the problem of ‘Sprachmischung’ and the intricacies of Contact Linguistics. Up to the Nineteen Nineties (see Banfi 1991, Wolf 1995) the ‘special’ relations between the various ‘Balkan Languages’ were considered assessable in terms of nine or ten characteristics which seemed to have many of the properties of structuralism’s distinctive features, namely:…

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