A language does not die when the old forget it, but when children no longer have a reason to learn it.

The figure was given in June 2024, at a meeting on Albanian language and culture in the diaspora, and it remains the clearest point of reference on the subject. Mimoza Hysa, head of the Centre for Diaspora Publications, told Voice of America that of some 400,000 Albanian children living in emigration who could attend Albanian classes, only about 30,000 do. The statement spoke of “five per cent”, but those figures themselves give about 7.5 per cent: fewer than one child in ten. She added that the interest of the two states, Albania and Kosovo, had been growing, but that the challenge does not belong to institutions alone; it belongs just as much to parents, teachers and the community.

The figure deserves a careful reading. It does not say that more than 90 per cent of diaspora children cannot speak Albanian. Many speak it at home, with grandparents, during summer holidays. It says something quieter: that the vast majority do not learn Albanian as a written and read language, with its grammar, literature and history. And a language spoken only in the kitchen rarely survives into the third generation.

An uneven map

According to the same centre, which publishes and distributes Albanian school textbooks in 23 countries through a joint programme of the governments of Albania and Kosovo, there are about 400 courses and schools, with more than 700 registered teachers. But forms of organisation vary radically from one country to another. In Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria and Croatia, mother-tongue teaching is integrated into public schools. In Italy and Greece, two of the countries with the largest Albanian communities, it runs on a voluntary basis. In the United States and Canada it relies mainly on private courses and community initiatives.

The inequality is plain. Where the host state treats the mother tongue as part of education, an Albanian child has an Albanian lesson in the timetable. Where it does not, everything depends on a teacher working after hours, often unpaid, in a borrowed room. At the June 2024 meeting, Adriana Bejko Fishta, head of the “Foleja e shqiponjave” school in Canada, sharply criticised both education ministries for broken promises to diaspora teachers, recalling that she and her colleagues had been working as volunteers for seventeen years.

Greece as a first test

In December 2024, Education Minister Ogerta Manastirliu announced that the Albanian government would for the first time fund a dedicated programme, “Teachers for Greece”, with about 50 teachers to receive financial and teaching support from January. The programme was formally presented in Athens on 2 March 2025, in the presence of Prime Minister Edi Rama, who called the first group of teachers the start of a spring for Albanian in Greece and promised that the model would be extended to other countries.

It is an important step, because it accepts a principle that had been missing: the Albanian teacher in emigration cannot be a volunteer forever. But fifty teachers in a country where, according to the Albanian embassy in Athens, supplementary Albanian classes are kept alive by a broad network of volunteer teachers are more a signal than a solution. The question is whether the signal will become a lasting policy, with an annual budget, or remain an initiative remembered at diaspora ceremonies.

Textbooks that arrive, readers who are missing

On the other hand, the state appears to have taken textbooks seriously. The Ministry of Education reported that during 2024, declared the Year of the Albanian Language, more than 15,000 books had been distributed to Albanian pupils in 16 countries, and that the unified series “Gjuha dhe Kultura Shqiptare” (Albanian Language and Culture), prepared jointly with Kosovo, would be completed with its third level. But a textbook is not enough if no one opens it. Five per cent is not a problem of books; it is a problem of time, motivation and presence.

For a review that writes about the fate of the language, this figure carries particular weight. The Albanian of the second generation in Italy, Greece or Germany will not vanish overnight. It will shrink slowly, from a full language to a vocabulary of feelings and food, from a language that reads to a language that only remembers. This can be stopped only if learning Albanian no longer depends on the heroism of a few teachers and becomes the right of every Albanian child, wherever they live.

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