Albanian language

Sounds

Albanian has seven vowels: {{IPA|/i ɛ a ? ɔ y u/}} and 29 phonemic consonants.

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Vowels

Consonants

The following is a table of the Albanian phonemic consonants. Orthography and pronunciation are shown later.

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Notes:

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• The affricates are pronounced as one sound (a stop and a fricative at the same point).
• The palatal stops q and gj are completely unknown to English, so the pronunciation guide is approximate. Among major languages, palatal stops can be found, for example, in Hungarian (where these sounds are spelt ty and gy respectively) or in Czech (respectively t' and d').
• The palatal nasal nj corresponds to the sound of the Spanish ñ or the French or Italian digraph gn (as in gnocchi). It is pronounced as one sound, not a nasal plus a glide.
• The ll sound is a velarized lateral, close to English "dark L".
• The contrast between flapped r and trilled rr is the same as in Spanish. English does not have any of the two sounds phonemically (but tt in butter is pronounced as a flap r in most American dialects).
• (1) The letter ç can be spelt ch on American English keyboards, both due to its English sound, but more importantly, due to analogy with Albanian xh, sh, zh. (Usually, however, it's spelt simply c, which may cause confusion; however, meanings are usually understood).