Reading Albanian Place Names

Definite and indefinite

Albanian marks definiteness with a suffix rather than a separate word. Vlorë is 'Vlorë'; Vlora is 'the Vlorë'. Both appear constantly, including on road signs, and neither is wrong.

This Atlas uses the indefinite form as the page title (Vlorë, Shkodër, Berat) and gives the Albanian definite form alongside it, because that is the form you will most often see locally.

Letters that are not what they look like

• ë — a soft, often barely voiced vowel; frequently silent at the end of a word.
• ç — 'ch' as in church.
• xh — 'j' as in jam.
• gj — a soft 'dy' sound, roughly as in 'due' in British English.
• q — a soft 'ty' sound; not a 'k'.
• dh — 'th' as in this. th — 'th' as in thin.
• rr — a strongly rolled r, distinct from single r.
• y — as in French 'tu' or German 'ü'.

Common elements in place names

• Mal / Malësi — mountain / highlands (Malësi e Madhe).
• Ujë / Uji — water (Uji i Ftohtë, 'the cold water').
• Syri — eye (Syri i Kaltër, 'the blue eye').
• Kepi — cape (Kepi i Rodonit).
• Liqeni — lake (Liqeni i Ohrit).
• Qafa — pass or col (Qafa e Thorës).
• Fushë — plain or field (Fushë-Krujë).
• Bregdeti — the coast.

Names you will see in two languages

Some places have long-established Greek names in the south (Himarë/Himara, Dhërmi/Drimades) and Italian forms inherited from the interwar period (Durrës/Durazzo, Vlorë/Valona). Older maps and books often use these.

Where the names come from

Albanian place names are layered like an archaeological site. The oldest go back to antiquity: Shkodër continues the Illyrian and Roman Scodra, Durrës comes from Dyrrachium, and Vlorë from the Greek Aulon. Slavic settlement from the 6th and 7th centuries left names such as Pogradec and the many places called Bistricë or Gorica, and five centuries of Ottoman rule added Turkish words for markets, inns and bridges.

The 20th century renamed things too. The communist state gave places ideological names — the oil town of Kuçovë was called Qyteti Stalin, 'Stalin City', from 1950 to 1990 — and after 1991 most of those reverted. Elsewhere villages were merged, renamed or given official Albanian forms in place of Greek, Slavic or Turkish ones, which is why an old map and a modern road sign can disagree.

How Albanian came to be written

Albanian was written late and in many scripts. The earliest surviving printed book, Gjon Buzuku's Meshari (a Catholic missal), dates from 1555 and uses the Latin alphabet; Orthodox writers in the south used Greek letters, Muslim writers Ottoman Arabic script, and there were even home-grown alphabets such as the Elbasan script.

The Congress of Manastir in 1908 settled on the Latin alphabet used today, with its digraphs (dh, gj, xh and the rest) in place of special letters. A unified literary standard, based mainly on the southern Tosk dialect, was fixed at the Congress of Orthography in 1972; it is the form on signs and in newspapers, while northerners and Kosovars speak the Gheg dialect at home.