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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Lab | |
|---|---|
| Labërisht | |
| Pronunciation | [labəˈɾiʃt] |
| Native to | Albania |
| Region | Labëria |
| Latin, Greek, Ottoman Turkish | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | labt1234 |
 Distribution of Albanian language dialects. | |
The Lab Albanian dialect (Albanian: Labërishtja or Dialekti lab) is a Tosk Albanian dialect associated with the wider definition of the ethnographic region of Labëria, spoken by Lab Albanians. Under this wider definition of Labëria, Lab Albanian stretches from Vlorë and Mallakastër south and east up to Gjirokastër, Lunxhëria and Sarandë. Notable aspects of Lab in Albanian and wider Balkan areal linguistics include its peculiar mix of conservative and innovative features, the lack (in some varieties) of typical Albanian Balkanisms like the admirative,[1] and the presence of features typical of Northern Gheg dialects despite it being a Southern dialect.
Labërishtja is a subdivision of the Southern Tosk group, which is itself a subdivision of Tosk Albanian, the collection of Albanian dialects south of the Shkumbin River. As such, it is most closely related to the Cham dialect of Chamëria, the Arbereshe of the old Albanian diaspora in Italy, and the Arvanitika of Arvanites in Greece.
 | This section should specify the language of its non-English content using {{lang}} or {{langx}}, {{transliteration}} for transliterated languages, and {{IPA}} for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used - notably sq for Albanian. (June 2025) |
Features typical of Lab include the unrounding of Albanian /y/ ([y]) to /i/ ([i]), thus merging it with the /i/ phoneme, and a velar articulation for Albanian gj ([ɟ]) and q ([c]). As such, in areas where Lab is less influenced by Standard Albanian, Albanians from elsewhere may be shocked to hear words like gjyshi ([ɟyʃi], grandfather) pronounced as gishi ([ɡiʃi]). Likewise, Lab Albanians may say they speak "shkip" ([ʃkip]), not shqip ([ʃcip]).
Lab also has some features that are more typical of Gheg dialects than Tosk ones: it preserves the Old Albanian vowel length distinction (lost elsewhere in Tosk). Although the loss of nasal vowels in Tosk is said to be a diagnostic feature separating Southern (Tosk) Albanian from Northern (Gheg) Albanian, Albanian linguists Dilo Sheper and Gjinari have reported that there are nasal vowels present in the Lab dialects of Kurvelesh and Himare, which would mean there are in fact Tosk dialects with nasal vowels, contrary to prior assumptions, although some Albanian writers like Paçarizi expressed uncertainty about the reports.[2] Menela Totoni, meanwhile, has detected the presence of nasal vowels in the extreme southern town of Borsh.[3] Paçarizi notes that the presence of nasal vowels in Lab might imply that the loss of nasals in Tosk can no longer be viewed as the taxonomical difference between Gheg and Tosk, and that it may have occurred in the majority of Tosk dialects after Tosk had already split from Gheg.[4]
Standard Albanian dh ([ð]) may also be represented as a ll ([ɫ] dark L) in many Lab dialects, leading madhe (/maðɛ/, "large") to be pronounced as malle ([maɫɛ]).
Certain Lab dialects shift the Albanian schwa to a back vowel, [ʌ] (as in English nut), while others merge it with e /ɛ/ . Many Lab dialects also pronounce the schwa at the end of words, saying [pɛsʌ] instead of [pɛs] for pesë ("five"). Albanian e/ɛ/ may also become a schwa in Lab before nasal consonants.
![[icon]](viewer.php?source=wikipedia&q=File%3AWiki%20letter%20w%20cropped.svg&result=0#selected-result){kind=small} | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding missing information. (June 2017) |
Lab Albanian uses different past participles than Standard Albanian, which is based on a dialect of Tosk proper, specifically the one from the ethnographic region of Dangellia due to its usage by Albanian nationalist writers. The past participle of marr (to take) is marrur (not marrë as in standard) and the past participle of them is themur, rather than thënë.
| This section needs expansion. You can help by adding missing information. (June 2017) |
Lab and its sister dialect, Cham, have been found to lack many of the particularities that wider Albanian has in morphological rules and syntactical patterns.[citation needed] Some[5] but not all[6] Lab dialects lack the admirative mood, typically considered a curious and unique particularism of Albanian although there are also related phenomena in some Bulgarian dialects.
Lab has exerted some influence on Standard Albanian, for example causing the emergence of the short particle due to its use (in Lab) for compound past tenses.[7]
Laberishtja also is peculiar in that certain Lab dialects may have (limited) use of a "have"(kam) + subjunctive formation of the future tense, which is more typically characteristic of remote Gheg dialects such as the Upper Reka dialect.[8][9]
Although the idea that the Gheg/Tosk split is the oldest and most significant dialectal division in Albanian is widely viewed as canon,[10] Lab has been found to exhibit certain "Gheg" grammatical characteristics (in addition to limited phonological characteristics such as retention of nasalization in selected Lab subdialects). Features that are typical of Gheg but not Tosk dialects but which are nevertheless found in Lab include the presence of the compound perfect and the pluperfect.[11]
| This section needs expansion. You can help by adding missing information. (June 2017) |
It is believed that Lab Albanian split from its sibling dialects of Cham, Arvanitika and Arbereshe some time in the Middle Ages.[citation needed] Since then, its features have evolved through a variety of influences: language contact with Greek and specifically the Himariote dialect [citation needed], isolation in mountainous regions [citation needed] and influence from Gheg dialects as Gheg speakers migrated to Lab areas in the Late Middle Ages and during the Ottoman era [citation needed].
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Lab Albanian dialect (Albanian: Labërishtja or Dialekti lab) is a Tosk Albanian dialect associated with the wider definition of the ethnographic region of Labëria, spoken by Lab Albanians. Under this wider definition of Labëria, Lab Albanian stretches from Vlorë and Mallakastër south and east up to Gjirokastër, Lunxhëria and Sarandë. Notable aspects of Lab in Albanian and wider Balkan areal linguistics include its peculiar mix of conservative and innovative features, the lack (in some varieties) of typical Albanian Balkanisms like the admirative, and the presence of features typical of Northern Gheg dialects despite it being a Southern dialect.
The Cham Albanian dialect (Albanian: Çamërisht or Dialekti çam), also called Cham Tosk or Arvanitika, is the dialect of the Albanian language spoken by the Cham Albanians, an Albanian ethnic sub-group native to the region of Chameria in southern Albania and northwestern Greece.
Albanian (endonym: shqip [ʃcip] , gjuha shqipe [ˈɟuha ˈʃcipɛ] , or arbërisht [aɾbəˈɾiʃt] ) is an Indo-European language and the only surviving representative of the Albanic branch, which belongs to the Paleo-Balkan group. It is the native language of the Albanian people. Standard Albanian is the official language of Albania and Kosovo, and a co-official language in North Macedonia and Montenegro, where it is the primary language of significant Albanian minority communities. Albanian is recognized as a minority language in Italy, Croatia, Romania, and Serbia. It is also spoken by long-established communities in Greece, and by the Albanian diaspora, which is generally concentrated in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania. Albanian is estimated to have as many as 7.5 million native speakers. Albanian and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region. Albanian in antiquity is often thought to have been an Illyrian language for obvious geographic and historical reasons, or otherwise an unmentioned Balkan Indo-European language that was closely related to Illyrian and Messapic. The Indo-European subfamily that gave rise to Albanian is called Albanoid in reference to a specific ethnolinguistically pertinent and historically compact language group. Whether descendants or sisters of what was called 'Illyrian' by classical sources, Albanian and Messapic, on the basis of shared features and innovations, are grouped together in a common branch in the current phylogenetic classification of the Indo-European language family. The first written mention of the Albanian language was in 1284 in a witness testimony from the Republic of Ragusa, while a letter written by Dominican Friar Gulielmus Adea in 1332 mentions the Albanians using the Latin alphabet in their writings. The oldest surviving attestation of modern Albanian is from 1462. The two main Albanian dialect groups (or varieties), Gheg and Tosk, are primarily distinguished by phonological differences and are mutually intelligible in their standard varieties, with Gheg spoken to the north and Tosk spoken to the south of the Shkumbin river. Their characteristics in the treatment of both native words and loanwords provide evidence that the split into the northern and the southern dialects occurred after Christianisation of the region (4th century AD), and most likely not later than the 6th century AD, hence possibly occupying roughly their present area divided by the Shkumbin river since the Post-Roman and Pre-Slavic period, straddling the Jireček Line. Centuries-old communities speaking Albanian dialects can be found scattered in Greece (the Arvanites and some communities in Epirus, Western Macedonia and Western Thrace), Croatia (the Arbanasi), Italy (the Arbëreshë) as well as in Romania, Turkey and Ukraine. The Malsia e Madhe Gheg Albanian and two varieties of the Tosk dialect, Arvanitika in Greece and Arbëresh in southern Italy, have preserved archaic elements of the language. Ethnic Albanians constitute a large diaspora, with many having long assimilated in different cultures and communities. Consequently, Albanian-speakers do not correspond to the total ethnic Albanian population, as many ethnic Albanians may identify as Albanian but are unable to speak the language. Standard Albanian is a standardised form of spoken Albanian based mainly on Tosk.
The Arbanasi dialect (natively: Arbëneshë) is a dialect of Gheg Albanian that is spoken in long-standing diaspora communities of Albanians in Croatia. Its speakers originated from the region of Kraja (now in modern Montenegro), and moved to Croatia in the early 18th century. It is notable for a number of divergent developments as well as preservations of certain archaic features of Medieval Gheg Albanian. Slavic Croatian influences are present, as are Romance influences from Italian and Venetian. The dialect may also be called the "Dalmatian dialect" of Albanian in some older publications.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
