19th century distribution of Albanian language dialects.

The Cham Albanian dialect (Albanian: Çamërisht, or Dialekti çam) is the dialect of the Albanian language spoken by the Cham Albanians, the former Albanian minority in Epirus region of north-eastern Greece.

[edit] Classification

The Cham dialect is a subbranch of the Tosk Albanian dialect.^{[citation needed]}The Cham dialect is the second southernmost dialect of the Albanian language, the other being Arvanitika, which also is a subbranch of Tosk Albanian. As such, Arvanitika and Cham dialect retain a number of common features.^[1]

[edit] Features

Like Arvanitika in southern Greece and Arbëresh in Italy, the Cham dialect retains some conservative features of Albanian, such as the old consonant clusters /kl/, /gl/, which in standard Albanian are q and gj, and retention of /l/ instead of /j/.^[2]

[edit] Written sources

The first Greek-Albanian dictionary was written by Markos Botsaris (in Albanian: Marko Boçari), which contains the first features of the Cham dialect. Based on this evidences, scholars have agreed that the Albanian language spoken by Souliotes was the a subbranch of the cham dialect.^[3] During the 19th century, Cham Albanians, started creating bejtes, which was a new kind of poems, mainly in Southern Albania. The most well-known bejtexhi was Muhamet Kyçyku (Çami), born in Konispol. He is the only poet in Albania that had written in the Cham dialect and, as it seems, was the first Albanian author to have written longer poetry.^[4]

[edit] See also

• Cham Albanians
• Souliotes
• Tosk Albanian
• Arvanitika

[edit] References