DISA MENDIME RRETH "GJUHËS SË NJËSUAR"
SOME THOUGHT ON "UNIFIED LANGUAGE"

Summary/Abstract: The cause of this article is the "Declaration" of the linguists of Shkodra (1992), published in the newspaper "Libertas" (3/1992, Tirana), expressing a new and different evaluation of the standard Albanian language and of the Congress of Orthography (November 1972). Declaration of the linguists requires objective and cautious recognition of literary Gheg tradition. The use of literary Gheg according to Principle 2 of the Declaration in my opinion could be accomplished without any difficulty. The central problem seems to be the standard language, the official language of administration, school, press, radio and so on. No matter how many congresses are organized in the future, the central problem, or the central decision, will be: will Tosk dialect remain the core of this standard language, or it will be revised and Gheg dialect gains this function? You cannot avoid this decision, e.g. by accepting some Gheg forms such as infinitive or participle, etc. In my opinion, an "organic coexistence" of both varieties (Gheg and Tosk) in some distant future is an illusion, it is impossible. A modern state, with a penetrating bureaucracy in all areas of life, cannot afford two standard languages side by side; such parallelism is not acceptable neither in education and the press. They require clear and homogeneous rules, as Duden puts them for German language.

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