The Acting President of the Republic of Kosovo, Albulena Haxhiu, participated today in the opening ceremony of the 44th International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature and Culture.

In her speech to the audience, U.D. President Haxhiu said that in the periods when Albanians lacked their institutions, Albanian remained one of the main forms of our cultural and political continuity, adding further that the right to education, to knowledge, to expression and to participation in public life were also connected with it.

Therefore, according to her, 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 the press, and when its use in public life was limited by the government itself. Today, inequalities 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", said U.D. President Haxhiu.

U.D. President Haxhiu further said that our experience makes us particularly sensitive to this, further adding that 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 Albanian 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 halls of the Seminar, in universities, institutes, libraries and archives. From them, Albanian has gained scholars, readers and an academic presence even outside the countries where it is spoken. This work is also related to the presence that Albanian will have there. He also saw the language as a link that transcends geographical divisions. "Despite our geographical boundaries, we will make together not only the idea, but above all the people who speak one language". he", emphasized U.D. President Haxhiu.

She said that Professor Ajeti had in mind the political boundaries that had divided the speakers of the same language, while according to U.D. President, digital communication has made the very relationship between language and space more complicated.

According to her, 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. A large part of the material he collected made accessible on the Internet, taking it out of the archive and putting it in the hands of researchers and readers wherever they were", said U.D. President Haxhiu.

U.D. President Haxhiu further added that 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 affects the relationship between country and belonging.

"The homeland has a geography, but belonging does not end in it. The territory remains one of the basic 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 new registers and forms "But, in the fields where knowledge, technology or cultural production are mainly developed in another language, the use of Albanian can begin to narrow. Albanian cannot remain a language of the past in a world that is building the future with algorithms." President Haxhiu.

In these new spaces, according to U.D. President Haxhiu, 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 also 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. Even this changes the circle of readers of Albanian literature and the way it is read outside the language in which it was written", U.D. has asserted. President Haxhiu.

In the end, U.D. President Haxhiu said that 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, you 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", U.D. said in her speech. President Haxhiu.

This post is also available in ENSR