Abstract:

The intake of English lexis in the Eastern Europe countries has been increasing considerably since the end of their political, social and cultural isolation. Having one of the most severe and violent political systems Albania was probably more eager to accelerate the exchanges with the ‘outer world’ and its integration in Europe. Thus adapting to the international context English language was, and still is, one of the mediators to achieve this integration. From the linguistic perspective what results from this languages contact are the loans, neologisms, and even ‘pseudo – loans’ (Albanian words with the form or the pronunciation of the donor language - English in this case, but that do not exist in the donor language). In this context this paper states some of the extra-linguistic factors (historical, social, political and other factors) which conditioned and determined the language contact between English and Albanian and that would further lead to a considerable number of borrowings from English. Pseudo loans and other new Albanian words created under the influence of English language are briefly discussed under the title of ‘Language shifting’. The study also describes Albanians’ attitude toward English language, which is found to be definitely a positive attitude. Based on the above overview of English-Albanian contact and on some of the linguistic outcomes deriving from it, is concluded that the impact of English language and culture in the Albanian context is of a considerable degree, and that the outcomes of this impact are only at the primary stages of identification and examination.

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