The Albanian literary language has never disappointed me

2022-11-10 17:31:08Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA AKAD. MEHMET KRAJA
Acad. Mehmet Kraja

Dear friends, academics, dignitaries of the Albanian language, Mr. President, Prime Minister!

Let me say from the beginning that I belong to that generation, which has known and experienced the Albanian literary language in all its components: idealism, enthusiasm, sometimes dilemmas and skepticism, then aggressive efforts to revise it standard, to use the infinitive as a "mea culpa" for all failures.

Today, being a writer who bows to the Albanian language as the greatest value we have, I tell you without any doubt that the Albanian literary language has never disappointed me, neither with the meanings of the words, nor with the past tense or the past participle. of verbs, nor with the syntactic charm that the co-ordinate or subordinate clauses in a multiple-meaning phrase receive.

I read and enjoy Mjeda and Fishta, Naim and Çajup, Koliq and Kuteli with equal pleasure. 

The Albanian literary language has served all the good writers wonderfully, it has served less to the average writers and little or not at all to the ungodly writers, who even today continue to blame the literary language for eventual failures in the field of creativity and knowledge. . Their skepticism is not related to the possibilities of language, but to their lack in the field of knowledge and cognition.

Beyond these personal observations, let me say that in Kosovo, the Albanian literary language and the standard, during these twenty years, have known positive developments: a long and difficult process of de-Salvization, as well as the return of the Albanian language, has already taken place and is continuing. from a second language to a language of wide state and institutional use.

But in this direction, we still have a lot of work to do, because Kosovo, in addition to the political, geographical, legal, diplomatic, administrative, military state, also needs to make the linguistic state. This is a difficult process, which must start from the Constitution of Kosovo, which, adopted under great pressure, makes linguistic discrimination, putting the language of 95% of the speakers on an equal footing with the language of 5% of the speakers of Kosovo.

Finally, let me say that our countries do not need to make policies to protect the language from its speakers, even if they sometimes abuse the language and it is not in God's right to use the language with dignity and honor, but the state needs to make policies to protect the language from the abandonment of its speakers.

Thank you for your attention!

*SPEECH OF THE ACADEMIC GIVEN AT THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WRITING CONGRESS

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