Dear Leaders of the Seminar,

dear professors, researchers and albanologists,

It is a special pleasure to be with you today at the opening of the 44th International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature and Culture.

In the periods when Albanians lacked their institutions, Albanian remained one of the main forms of our cultural and political continuity. The right to education, to knowledge, to expression and to participation in public life have been connected with it. Therefore, the history of Albanian in Kosovo cannot be separated from the political history, which, in different periods, has determined its place in public life.

Many of us have lived the time when Albanian was excluded from schools and universities, from television and from the press, and when its use in public life was limited by the government itself. Today, disparities between languages ​​no longer necessarily appear in this form. Languages ​​that have large corpora, that have a long tradition of digitization and strong technological support enjoy an advantage that is not only related to the number of speakers, but also to the amount of material that exists in digital form. Therefore, even when languages ​​are equal before the law, they are not necessarily equal in the spaces where knowledge is produced and circulated.

Our experience makes us particularly sensitive to this. It would not be progress if the former linguistic hierarchies disappeared from the law, only to return to technology. For more than fifty years, people who have worked for the Albanian language in universities and Albanianological centers inside and outside the country have gathered around this Seminar. Students have been formed here, speeches and materials from the field have been collected, archives have been opened, studies have been written and works have been translated that have brought Albanian literature to other readers. Many of these works have required years and have continued far from the Seminary halls, in universities, institutes, libraries and archives.

From them, Albanian has gained researchers, readers and academic presence even outside the countries where it is spoken. With the displacement of an increasingly large part of knowledge in the digital environment, this work is also related to the presence that Albanian will have there.

Our academic, Idriz Ajeti, also saw language as a bond that transcends geographical divisions. "Regardless of our geographical extent, we will work together beyond the borders, not only the idea, but above all the people who speak the same language", he said.

Professor Ajeti had in mind the political boundaries that separated the speakers of the same language. Meanwhile, digital communication has made the relationship between language and space more complicated. The linguistic repertoire of the individual no longer necessarily coincides with the geography of the country where he lives.

This relationship between language and space was well known by Robert Elsie, the albanologist and translator, who connected his path towards albanology with this Seminar early on.

He translated Albanian poets and prose writers, from old literature to contemporary authors, collected and recorded speeches in more than 150 places, searched archives for forgotten texts and documents and traced early photographs of Albanian villages. He made much of the material he collected available online, taking it out of the archive and into the hands of researchers and readers everywhere.

Among the topics you have chosen this year, the one about the physical, metaphysical and surreal homeland seems to me to be particularly relevant, because it touches on the relationship between country and belonging. Homeland has a geography, but belonging does not end there. Territory remains one of the fundamental ways we understand the homeland, but not the only way we experience it. Literature has proven this especially through the experience of exile, where the country left behind continues to live in memory and language. Today, this separation can happen even without exile.

Closer contact with other languages ​​expands the conceptual fund of Albanian and creates registers and new forms of expression. But, in areas where knowledge, technology or cultural production are mainly developed in another language, the use of Albanian may begin to narrow. Albanian cannot remain a language of the past in a world that is building the future with algorithms.

In these new spaces, Albanian literature also meets another reader. The writer can no longer count on the reader sharing with him the same canon, the same cultural memory or the same horizon of references. Among you there are seminarians who have learned Albanian as a second or third language and who approach Albanian literature from other literary traditions. You read the Albanian text with a different linguistic and cultural experience and, in many cases, you then take it to your universities, studies, translations and languages. This also changes the circle of readers of Albanian literature and the way it is read outside the language in which it is written.

We who make public decisions should also learn from your work. You, who study Albanian, document it, enrich it through the creation of translation and follow its changes with the tools of science, have the authority to show us where it is gaining ground, where it is losing functions and what cannot be neglected. From our side, we will be available whenever this work requires institutional support, whether for research, digitization, publication, translation or for the development of new tools for Albanian.

I wish you good work at the 44th International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature and Culture.

Welcome to Pristina!

This post is also available in ENSR