Two major Albanian dialects have been developing in different ways for about 1000 years: Gheg, spoken in northern Albania, above the Shkumbin River; and Tosk, found to the south of that river, as well as in the Italian and Greek enclaves. The speakers of these dialects, for the most part, can understand one another. A South Gheg dialect was used as the official language of Albania from 1909 until World War II; thereafter, the official language was based on Tosk. Written in Roman script, a limited amount of literature exists in Albanian, most of it produced after the 19th-century national revival.

Albanian constitutes a separate branch of the Indo-European language family. Its grammar is most similar to that of Modern Greek and Romanian. The vocabulary includes many loanwords from Latin, Romanian, and especially Turkish language. The phonetic system is quite peculiar for Indo-European, it includes several sounds found nowhere else, and also the so-called "schwa" which was developed late and is not Indo-European in its nature.

Albanian nouns have two genders (masculine and feminine), five cases (including ablative, lost in all other European languages), definite and indefinite articles are widely used. Practically all inflexions were lost, and remaining ones dont remind Proto-Indo-European. The verb system is quite complicated, having eight tenses (including two different futures and two aorists), and several moods: indicative, imperative, conditional, conjunctive, optative and admirative; active and passive voices are used.

In fact, Albanian is very interesting with its unique features and really worth studying. Some time we will surely publish its grammar free online.