Albanian is clearly an Indo-European language although this is superficially obscured by a vocabulary and morphology borrowed from its numerous neighbours. It shows little affinity with other known Indo-European languages and must be the sole survivor of a distinct branch. There is a possibility that Albanian is a survivour of the family of Illyrian languages known to have been spoken in this region.

The Gheg and Tosk dialects of Albanian are spoken by some two million people on the eastern Adriatic coast and in Kosovo. Gheg is spoken in the north of Albania and Tosk in the south and in the enclaves that have diverged for more than a millennium. Moderate forms are mutually intelligible.

About 500,000 speakers live in isolated Italian villages (from the Abruzzi to Sicily) and in southern Greece. The pockets in Italy, Sicily and Greece represent poorly understood folk movements in the 13th - 15th centuries. Other enclaves in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Bessarabia are of unknown date.