The Linguistic History of the Place-names of Albania

Albania`s history is rich of variety, which is also reflected in its place-names. In ancient times Albania was the home of tribes which are called Illyrians. In the sixth century BC, Greeks founded colonies on the coast of Albania, e.g. Apollonia or Dyrrhachium, today called Durrs. As a result of their expansion to the East, the territory of Albania fell under Roman rule in the second century BC. In the sixth century AD, when Albania was politically subordinate to Byzantium, the Slavs appeared and settled permanently in large parts of the Balkans including Albania. After the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the Ottomans also reached out for the Balkans. As a consequence, Albania became part of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over Albania for almost 500 years. The place-names of Albania are witnesses of this varied history. In chronological order they have ancient Greek, Latin, Slavic, Byzantine- Greek, Ottoman and of course also Albanian origins. Especially with the last ones it is often not very clear, when they had been created since there is a very incomplete documentation regarding Albania`s older historical periods. The project examines the place-names in Albania according to their different origins and analyzes the phonetic changes that have taken place in these place-names. This is important since Albanian itself is attested in written documents only since the mid-16th century. The linguistic analysis not only reveals the origin, i.e. the linguistic source of the place-names, but also shows how they changed their phonological form since their first attestation. The project will thus also determine the first attestation of place-names in ancient, medieval or modern documents in various languages (Latin, Greek, Serbian, Italian, Ottoman sources). The determination of the origin and the phonological changes of the place-names is an important contribution not only to the linguistic history of Albania, but also to the question of the settlement history of Albania. Within the linguistic analysis, the morphological formation of the place-names of Albania is analyzed in order to determine the principles of Albanian place- naming. The project results will be published in an online place-name lexicon that provides all available information on documentation and linguistic history for every place-name in Albania. For this purpose, maps of Albania will be created, on which the individual place- names are clearly marked according to various aspects such as origin, documentation and morphological formation. A printed manual will be published in addition to the online place- name lexicon, in which the history and principles of place-name formation in Albania and the specific documentation of place-names are described and summarized.