Gheg Albanian

Gheg (also spelled Geg; Gheg Albanian: gegnishtja, Standard gegërishtja) is one of the two major varieties of Albanian, the other being Tosk. The geographic dividing line between the two varieties is the Shkumbin River, which winds its way through central Albania. Gheg is spoken in northern and central Albania, Kosovo, northwestern North Macedonia, southeastern Montenegro and southern Serbia by the Albanian dialectal subgroup known as Ghegs. Gheg does not have any official status as a written language in any country. Publications in Kosovo and North Macedonia are in Standard Albanian, which is based on Tosk. However, some authors continue to write in Gheg. Before World War II, there had been no official attempt to enforce a unified Albanian literary language; both literary Gheg and literary Tosk were used. The communist regime in Albania imposed nationwide a standard that was based on the variant of Tosk spoken in and around the city of Korçë. With the warming of relations between Albania and Yugoslavia starting in the late 1960s, the Kosovo Albanians—the largest ethnic group in Kosovo—adopted the same standard in a process that began in 1968 and culminated with the appearance of the first unified Albanian orthographic handbook and dictionary in 1972. Although they had until then used Gheg and almost all Albanian writers in Yugoslavia were Ghegs, they chose to write in Tosk for political reasons. The change of literary language has had significant political and cultural consequences because the Albanian language is the main criterion for Albanian self identity. The standardization has been criticized, notably by the writer Arshi Pipa, who claimed that the move had deprived Albanian of its richness at the expense of the Ghegs. He referred to literary Albanian as a "monstrosity" produced by the Tosk communist leadership, who had conquered anti-communist northern Albania and imposed their own dialect on the Ghegs. In post-WWII Yugoslavia there was a project to create a Kosovan language, which would have been largely Gheg.