Albanian

The Albanian language is an isolate tongue of the Indo-European group of languages. Isolates are languages that lack common historical ancestry with other tongues. They form independent branches on the language tree.
 
Albania is the native tongue in six countries. The countries are FYROM, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Greece, and, of course, Albania. These countries speak different variants of the tongue. You see, Albania is categorized into two main dialects:

1. Ghag/ Gheg.
2. Tosk.

 
Ghag is the dialect in Montenegro, Serbia, FYROM, and parts of Kosovo. Tosk is, on the other hand, the dialect in Albania and the rest of Kosovo.
 
Albania can also be found, as a historical/ immigrant tongue, in the USA, Africa and other parts of Europe. Estimates place Albanian speakers at about 8 million souls worldwide.
 

Challenges To Expect While Learning Albanian

Learning a new tongue is not an easy thing. The difficulty may, however, escalate, when the tongue in question is Albania. Here are some of the challenges an English speaking people may face:
 
1. Clitics.

These are shortened forms of pronouns that always precede a verb. Clitics usually cluster together and will come out as strange to English-speaking folk.
 
2. The Alphabet And Vowels.

The English alphabet has 26 letters. The Albania-alphabet has 36 letters. Need I say more. To learn Albanian, English speakers have to master ten more letters.

This tongue also has more vowels than the English language. English has five vowels, Albania has seven. As if this is not hard enough, you will have to memorize well over 2000 characters before you can read Albania fluently.
 
3. Brevity.

Albanian is very economical on word use. Grammatically correct sentences sound like telegrams when translated directly into English. ‘Un-learning’ the relatively verbose English sentence structuring will be a challenge.

All in all, learning the Albanian language has its perks. The characters are visually appealing. An English speaker will enjoy how different the two tongues are.