Albania has provisionally closed the first four chapters of its accession talks with the European Union, education and culture among them, and the process is leaving its mark on the very language Albanians use to talk about their state.

Four chapters and a timetable

On 14 July 2026, at the ninth Intergovernmental Conference in Brussels, Albania and the EU agreed to provisionally close chapters 25 (science and research), 26 (education and culture) and 30 (external relations). It was the first time the country had closed any negotiating chapter. Three months later, on 13 October in Luxembourg, chapter 20, on industrial policy and enterprise, followed. Every chapter is now open: the first cluster, “Fundamentals”, was opened on 15 October 2024, and the last, “Resources, agriculture and cohesion”, on 17 November 2025.

The word “provisionally” matters. Agreements on individual chapters become final only once agreement has been reached across the whole body of EU law, and Brussels keeps the right to revisit them. The July step was made possible by the report confirming that Albania had met the interim benchmarks in the “Fundamentals” cluster, which it received on 26 May 2026, becoming the second candidate country, after Montenegro, to reach that stage.

Speed and depth: where the parties stand

The government presents the process as proof that reforms are delivering. Prime Minister Edi Rama described the July closures as another very important milestone, and the official goal remains closing every chapter by the end of 2027. The enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, said Brussels supports Tirana’s efforts to meet that deadline, and according to Euronews the Commission was preparing in September to write it into a formal roadmap for Albania.

The same officials also recall the conditions. Kos asked Albania to keep up the momentum and deepen its reforms, especially on the rule of law and the fight against corruption. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, during her visit in September, stressed that adopting new laws is not enough: they also have to be implemented.

The opposition has been sceptical from the start. In October 2024, when the first cluster opened, the leader of the Democratic Party, Sali Berisha, argued that Albania met no criterion for sitting at the negotiating table other than the geostrategic one, while still welcoming the opening itself. Civil society has asked for more transparency: the analyst Gjergji Vurmo wrote that same year that requests for a public hearing on the negotiating position at the National Council for European Integration had been ignored. The researcher Fjona Merkaj reads the May report as a green light to move forward; other observers point to the gap between adopting reforms and implementing them sustainably.

A language being Albanianised

Beyond the political calendar, the negotiations are also a linguistic event. Words such as “acquis”, “grup-kapitull” (cluster) and “interim benchmarks” have travelled from Brussels documents into the evening news and everyday conversation. In its Albanian-language announcements, the EU Delegation in Tirana uses forms such as “grup-kapitull” and “acquis”. Some terms have been translated, others borrowed as they are, and the mixture shows a language still deciding how to name a new institutional reality.

The heaviest work, however, happens out of public view. The manual for translating EU legislation, published in Tirana in 2006 by the Ministry of European Integration with the support of the German agency GTZ, estimated that the body of law candidate countries must translate came to about 95,000 pages of the Official Journal. For the most recent member states at the time, according to the same manual, it had filled 204 volumes. Its authors saw the task as something more than translation:

“Rather than a translation, this process should be conceived as an Albanianisation of the acquis communautaire…” (our translation)

— Manual for the Translation of Community Legislation, Ministry of European Integration, Tirana, 2006

The manual also proposed terminology dictionaries to be shared with the other Albanian-speaking territories, in order to unify Albanian terminology. Today it is also hosted on the website of Kosovo’s Ministry of European Integration: a sign that the language of the negotiations, unlike the negotiations themselves, does not stop at the state border.

Chapter 26 and the question that remains

There is something telling in the fact that one of the first chapters closed is the one on education and culture. Closing it certifies that the relevant laws and institutions conform to European standards, but it says nothing about the quality of the language in which future laws will be written, or about how citizens will read them. The political debate over the pace of the process will continue, and each side will read it through its own lens. The linguistic question, how a state should speak Albanian while absorbing a new administrative language, is likely to remain open well after the final date of the negotiations.

Sources