The Albanian Linguistic Journey from Ancient Illyricum to EU : Lexical Borrowings

Where does a language come from? Every language has its own history and during the course of that history, it might change, evolve or even die. Why do languages borrow from each other? Borrowing seems to be true for every language that has contact with another, even for major cultural languages such as Greek. Every case though is unique in itself. From which languages can a language borrow? Speakers of a certain language borrow from the people that they come in contact with, face-to-face or otherwise. How do languages incorporate those borrowings? Lexical borrowings are responsible for as much as ninety percent of the Albanian vocabulary and due to globalization, this percentage is about to grow even more. With a great history of three thousand years behind it and being neighbor to the two great civilizations of the then known world, Ancient Greece and Rome, Albanian has borrowed more words than any other European language.Lexical borrowings are tightly connected to the history and culture of this nation. Depending on the presence of which foreign power ruled in the Albanian territories at which time, these borrowings have had as a primary source either Greek (Ancient, Middle or New), Latin or Turkish with a few minor interferences from Gothic and Slavic languages.Every language has its own reasons for borrowing from another language. There are two main reasons: prestige and need. Albanian is not an exception. Albanian has borrowed from Greek and Latin both on the basis of need and on the basis of prestige. The primary objective for this master thesis is the identification of the vast numbers of lexical borrowings in the Albanian language, which languages they primarily come from, why the Albanian language has borrowed so many words during the course of its history and how those borrowings are incorporated in the Albanian language