Albanian, widely regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn, is only taught in a few American institutions.
Albanian, widely regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn, is only taught in a few American institutions.
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is now the only Ivy League school to offer classes in Albanian.
This semester, elementary Albanian I classes began in the Near Eastern languages and Civilizations (NELC) department, which also offers Aramaic, Persian, Turkish, and Yiddish, the Harvard Magazine announced.
Albanian is regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn due to its dissimilarity to other languages and complex grammatical structure.
Edona Cosovic, a second-year government concentrator from eastern Montenegro, was among those who advocated for the inclusion of Albanian. She learned to speak Albanian informally as a child in the United States but struggled to keep up.
Despite her strong desire to learn Albanian, Coscoviv said she found it difficult due to her parents’ limited financial resources and lack of access to Albanian channels.
“We’re in school all day, we listen to American TV, everything’s in English, and they are also trying to learn English because they’re working here, and they’re also trying to make money, so we lose the language very, very quickly, within one generation,” Cosovic told the newspaper.
In March 2022, she approached Eva Stathi Misho, a NELC student coordinator, to help her develop a course at Harvard. Misho studied Albanian language and literature in Tirana before coming to the US to study classics at Hellenic College.
She is teaching her sons Albanian by reading and speaking to them in Albanian, demonstrating that “we exist and have a language.” She believes the course will help clarify the answer to the question of which language is spoken in Albania.
The university announced that it would offer an Albanian course for the first time in the school’s history with an option to enroll in it as a selective subject.
In a report from Erudera, Harvard University data showed that nearly 60 percent of American Albanians live in New York, Michigan, and Massachusetts.
Massachusetts is the most educated, employed, and earns the highest annual income while New York has the most Albanians with bachelor’s degrees. Massachusetts is also the oldest in terms of demographics.
