made by the Greeks, Turks, and Slavs. The first
written documents in Albanian did not appear until the fifteenth
century; therefore it is difficult to trace the development of the
language during the earlier period.

The repressive policies of the Ottoman rulers over a period of 450
years, beginning in the fifteenth century, further retarded language
development. Written Albanian was forbidden, and only the Turkish or
Greek languages could be used in schools. Emigre Albanians, particularly
those in Italy after 1848, helped keep the written language alive. Until
the nineteenth century continuity of the language in Turkish-dominated
areas was provided largely by verbal communication, including ballads
and folk tales (see ch. 7, Communications and Cultural Development).

By the early twentieth century more than a dozen different alphabets had
developed. Some were predominantly either Latin, Greek, or Turko-Arabic.
Many were a mixture of several forms. It was not until 1908 that a
standardized orthography was adopted. The Latin-based alphabet of
thirty-six letters, approved at that time by a linguistic congress at
Monastir, was made official by a government directive in 1924 and
continued in use in 1970.

Letters are written as they are pronounced. There have been variations
in the spelling of many words because of dialectical differences, and
they still persist despite the government's efforts to develop a uniform
language. A dictionary was published by the Institute of Sciences in
Tirana in 1954, and it indicated that the spelling of some words varied.
During the 1960s the Linguistics and History Institute, which was part
of the State University of Tirana, carried on studies relating to
language origins and morphology, but no lexicon was known to have
appeared as of early 1970 to standardize spelling or supersede the 1954
dictionary.

The two principal Albanian dialects are Geg, spoken by about two-thirds
of the people, including those in the Kosovo region of Yugoslavia, and
Tosk, by the remaining third. There are subvarieties of both dialects.
Despite the considerable variations that developed in the many isolated
communities, Albanians are able to communicate easily with each other.

Efforts were made by the government during the 1920s and 1930s to
establish the dialect of the Elbasan area, which was a mixture of Geg
and Tosk, as the standard and official language; but the local dialects
persisted, and writers and