Origin of Albanians

The origin of the Albanians has been for some time a matter of dispute among historians. Contemporary historians conclude that the Albanians are not descendants of a single ancient population and apart from a possible connection with prehistoric Balkan populations, such as the Illyrians, Dacians or Thracians, there is an additional admixture of Slavic, Greek, Vlach, Roman, Celtic and Germanic element. Little is known about the ancient Balkan people, and they blended into one another in Thraco-Illyrian and Daco-Thracian contact zones even in antiquity.

The Albanians first appear in the historical record in Byzantine sources of the 11th century. At this point, they were already fully Christianized. Very little evidence of pre-Christian Albanian culture survives, although Albanian mythology and folklore are of Paleo-Balkanic origin and almost all of their elements are pagan, in particular showing Greek influence.

The Albanian language forms a separate branch of Indo-European, first attested in the 15th century, and is considered to have evolved from one of the Paleo-Balkans languages of antiquity.

Studies in genetic anthropology show that the Albanians share similar ancestry to many other Europeans, and especially other peoples of the Balkans. The Albanians are also one of Europe's populations that has most common ancestors within their own ethnic group even though they share ancestors with other ethnic groups.

The Albanian language is attested in a written form only in the 15th century AD, when the Albanian ethnos was already formed. In the absence of prior data on the language, scholars have used the Latin and Slav loans into Albanian for identifying its location of origin.

The place where the Albanian language was formed is uncertain. Analysis has suggested that it was in a mountainous region, rather than in a plain or seacoast. While the words for plants and animals characteristic of mountainous regions are entirely original, the names for fish and for agricultural activities are generally assumed to have been borrowed from other languages. However, considering the presence of some preserved old terms related to the sea fauna, some have assumed that this vocabulary might have been lost in the course of time after the proto-Albanian tribes were pushed back into the inland during invasions. The Slavic loans in Albanian suggest that contacts between two populations took place when Albanians dwelt in forests 600–900 metres above sea level. The overwhelming amount of mountaineering and shepherding vocabulary, coupled with the extensive influence of Latin makes it likely that the Albanians originated north of the Jireček Line, further north and inland than the current borders of Albania suggest. It has long been recognized that there are two treatments of Latin loans in Albanian, of Old Dalmatian type and Romanian type, but that would point out to two geographic layers, coastal Adriatic and inner Balkan region. Some scholars believe that the Latin influence over Albanian is of Eastern Romance origin, rather than of Dalmatian origin, which would exclude Dalmatia as a place of origin. Adding to this the several hundred words in Romanian that are cognate only with Albanian cognates (see Eastern Romance substratum), these scholars assume that Romanians and Albanians lived in close proximity at one time. The areas where this might have happened is the Morava valley in eastern Serbia.

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