THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE PRESS IN THE STANDARDIZATION OF ALBANIAN LANGUAGE
Keywords:
language planning, language policy, Albanian press, language standardizationAbstract
In this paper, we observe aspects of the language and language planning in the pages of the Albanian periodicals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the first stage of the Albanian language planning the press played a major role as the only forum for the dissemination of the opinions of the scholars, specialists, and language admirers, as well, who may not have had a proper language preparation, but they had the will and desire to make a contribution to the Albanian language. The number of magazines and newspapers published at that time in Albania was relatively high although many did not have great longevity. However, some of them managed to survive the rapid development of the Albanian society and managed to create their own tradition, maintaining a clear physiognomy with well-defined and pursued fanaticism and sometimes with great difficulty.
We think that the functions the Albanian press has done to help a common literary language can be divided into several aspects: it mainly managed to reflect discussions, enterprises, and institutional decisions about the language; the press came to present problems and discussions about specific aspects of the language which required a closer scientific examination; the press had the ability that through selected publications, presented documents, and historical and scientific fact analyzing to create a certain opinion depending on the interests of publishers or a certain group of people.
In order to observe these attitudes and functions that fulfilled the published temporal issues during the first stage of the Albanian language planning, we thought to look closely at two of them in our paper.
We have chosen, as the subject of our survey, the magazines "Albania" and "Hylli i Dritës", as the most long-lived magazines, with a clearly defined and evaluated purpose in and out of the Albanian borders, for the high level of articles published in them.
The criteria for our observation methodology is to focus on the articles that directly or indirectly deal with matters that have a logical and factual connection to the language planning of the Albanian or other languages. Our observation would have a descriptive character of the authors' views and, in some cases, we would make analyzes, approaches, and comparisons among them.
References
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