Cham Albanian dialect

The Cham Albanian dialect (Albanian: Çamërisht, Dialekti çam) is the dialect of the Albanian language spoken by the Cham Albanians, an ethnic Albanian minority in the Epirus region of northwestern Greece.

Cham Albanian is part of Tosk Albanian and is the second-southernmost variety of Albanian language, the other being Arvanitika, which is also part of Tosk Albanian. As such, Arvanitika and Cham dialect retain a number of common features. It also thus closely related to Arbëresh and Lab.

Linguists the Cham dialect has a conservative character, which is due to the close proximity and its continuous contacts with the Greek language. They argue that this conservative character, which is reflected in a number of peculiar features of the dialect, is endangered, as are the Albanian toponyms of the region, which are no longer in use, and which have provided valuable material for research into the historical evolution of Albanian.

Like Arvanitika in southern Greece and Arbëresh in Italy, Cham Albanian retains some conservative features of Albanian, such as the old consonant clusters /kl/, /gl/, which in standard Albanian are q and gj, and retention of /l/ instead of /j/.

Like Lab and also the Gheg dialects of Debar and Ulqin, Cham unrounds Albanian /y/ to /i/. It also fronts the Albanian schwa ë, and merges it with e -- this is the opposite of certain Lab dialects, which tend to back the schwa into /ʌ/ (as in English "nut").

The declensions of verbs and nouns may vary in Cham Albanian:

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