British Author in Kosovo on Learning Albanian and Language Differences Across Albania: S7E6

Language can be a lens into culture, a way to share our experiences and a tool to help others.  These are some of the aspects of language that we discuss with guest Elizabeth Gowing. She worked in primary education in inner London before moving to the Balkans in 2006. From then until very recently she split her time between Kosovo, Albania and the UK. During her time in the Balkans she immersed herself in many of the languages used there and shares the cultural insights that she learned. One of these experiences while she was in Kosovo was co-founding The Ideas Partnership non-profit. She is also the owner of the Sapune social enterprise, offering employment to village and minority community women and support to the education of their children. Elizabeth is also an author of five travel books and has translated two books from Albanian. 

Original publication date: March 5, 2021

Elizabeth's website: https://www.elizabethgowing.com/

More: https://linktr.ee/stephfuccio

Transcript

Elizabeth Gowing: 

Well, my father was in the Air Force, the Royal Air Force, and so I lived as a child in Germany and in Belgium and in Algeria. And then as an adult, I've lived in Kosovo, which is where I still spend most of my time, and in Albania, which is where I was spending a lot time with my partner's job until August this year. And then the UK, which is where I'm from. So I guess my travel has been not at all in South America, very— never been to South America at all, and a little bit in Asia, but far more of it in Europe and then some countries of Africa as well.

Stephanie Fuccio: 

And are you in Albania now or in Kosovo now?

Elizabeth Gowing:

I'm actually in the UK now. I arrived 2 days ago. Yeah. We don't have a home in Albania anymore since August. We've, we left our flat there because my partner's job finished. So although we've actually been back a few times and we've seen a few friends, and I hope and I'm sure that that will continue, and my partner has some work there and I'm on the board of a nonprofit there, and so there are things that will keep us connected to Albania in some ways, but having tried for 7 years to keep a 3-way lifestyle, it was quite exhausting. So it's quite nice that now we're just dividing ourselves between Kosovo and the UK. That is quite a switch.

Stephanie Fuccio: 

We initially connected on, I believe, one of the Expat in Tirana Facebook groups.

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yes, which I'm still I'm still a member of because there's still plenty that's useful to learn.

Stephanie Fuccio: 

I was in China for a number of years and there are a bunch of groups I'm still in there even though I don't have any plans to go back, but there's community that you build up that you don't want to leave just because you're geographically not there.

Elizabeth Gowing: 

Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie Fuccio: 

So 65 countries in many different regions. How about languages? What languages do you use?

Elizabeth Gowing: 

Well, I've got some kind of exam or proficiency in 6 languages, but it's not like I feel at all confident in quite a lot of them because some of those exams were a while ago. But so as well as native English, my French is not bad because of having lived in Belgium and in Algeria. So I can read French quite well and I can understand French reasonably. And then when I start to speak French, out comes Albanian now because Albanian is— yeah, that's a bit weird. I think Albanian has now just become sort of foreign language. So when I try to speak a foreign language, that's what comes out. And my Albanian is pretty much fluent now. I work as a translator. And so of course I'm still learning and pretty much every day there's a new thing and I'm sure I make mistakes, but I'm completely functional in Albanian. And then I learned Serbian. I did the basic level exam in Serbian when I was living in Kosovo, when we first moved to Kosovo. And then having learned Albanian and Serbian, I was really interested in Turkish, which is one of the languages that both of those borrow a lot from. 

And so I did my basic level exam in Turkish a few years ago. In fact, I did that on the bus when I was traveling back and forth between Kosovo and Albania, which was a sort of 5-hour journey one way every week. So it was like 10 hours on the bus. So I did various language learning with headphones during that time. So that's how I managed to get my Turkish. And then before that, when I was in school— oh no, actually as a young adult, I did Italian as like in evening classes. When I was at university, I learned Esperanto. Which was just kind of for fun. And I— the British GCSEs, which was the old, the exam you do kind of age 16, they were just phasing that out for Esperanto. So I was told if I wanted to get a qualification, then this was like my last year. So I studied for the Esperanto GCSE exam.

Stephanie Fuccio:

I didn't realize they had that for Esperanto.

Elizabeth Gowing: 

That's cool. Well, they don't anymore. That was the last year.

Stephanie Fuccio:

So why did they take that away?

Elizabeth Gowing:

I guess there are not so many people speaking Esperanto.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Okay, that's quite a mouthful. So maybe we should focus on the Albanian with some questions about Serbian and Turkish too. Maybe kind of center it around there. You learned in order Albanian, then Serbian, then Turkish?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yes, exactly. Serbian, because obviously that's used a lot in Kosovo. It's one of the official languages in Kosovo, and there is a minority of people who have that as their first language, so it felt like it was right to be able to speak that. And then Turkish is also an official language in Kosovo, but only in a few municipalities. So I think Kosovo is one of only 3 countries in the world that has Turkish as an official language. So there's Turkey itself, there's Cyprus, and there's Kosovo.

Stephanie Fuccio:

And what was your initial motivation for learning Albanian in the first place?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Wherever I go, especially if I'm planning to live there, but even if I just go on holiday, then of course you want to, to be able to talk to people. And people are very appreciative of that, I think, with Albanian, far more than with other languages which are more widely spoken, because so few people speak Albanian that are foreigners. I think people— it makes even more of a bond. People see it as even more of a sign of respect. And so opened up all kinds of friendships and chances to get to know people and chances to understand the country. So yeah, I knew that I would learn Albanian when we knew we were moving there.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Sure. Did you start learning before you moved here?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Well, my partner was offered the job and 10 days later our house was packed up and then 10 days after that we were there, so it was 20 days. So I said, okay, I'm going to learn one word a day. So I arrived in Kosovo speaking 20 words of Albanian.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Do you remember what those 20 words were?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yes. What do I remember? Well, I tried to be strategic about working through what I knew I would be doing. So I was like, okay, we're going to be arriving in the evening, so I need to 'Good evening' is going to need to be my very first word, and then we're going to need to get to the hotel, and then we're going to need to say hello and thank you, whatever. And then I remember sort of the 20th word I learnt was— I was working out, okay, I'll have then got to breakfast and I'll need to go down to the hotel restaurant and I'll need to ask for orange juice. So I remember orange juice was word number 20.

Stephanie Fuccio:

As you were learning the language, did your initial ideas about Albanian culture or the Albanian people or what have you change as you understood more of the language?

Elizabeth Gowing:

I mean, I think language is definitely a way into people, whatever, whatever language and whatever people. Probably that's not so obvious at the very beginning. It's more when you're learning some of the sort of subtleties of the language that you start to see how, what the untranslatable bits are or what the peculiarities are. And Albanian, I mean, Albanian is a really fascinating language because it's on its own branch of the Indo-European tree of languages. So it doesn't have any languages like it, although it does have a lot of borrowed words. And one of the features, which is not unique, but it's very rare, is the admirative case of verbs, which is what's used for— sorry, actually the admirative I think is unique. Sorry. It's the other, the optative, which is not unique because I know it exists in Greek as well, but it's the optative that I think is really interesting as a way into some of the most important bits of the Albanian kind of psyche or the things that you the most significant things that you might say to somebody, because the optative is what you use for blessings and also for curses. So the optative is what you use when you sneeze and somebody says they wish you shendet, which is health, which is the response to a sneeze. 

But in Albanian, I don't know if it's the only language, but I haven't come across any others that then have a required response from the sneezer. So not just a required response from the people with them. So you sneeze, somebody says "Shendet," and then you say "Shendet păț," which means "May you have health." So you both wish each other health, which, I mean, in these times of pandemic, essentially it's sort of like showing how stuff spreads. It's quite an interesting approach. If someone sneezes, actually you both need to be wished good health, not just the sneezer. And yeah, the same optative is used for all kinds of other little kind of ticks. So if you have your hair cut, then you're told to, like, "May it be 'with good health for you,' or if you buy something to wear, then you'll be told 'egzof,' like, 'may you enjoy it.' If you tell somebody your name, they will say 'egzofsh,' which is a slightly different form of the same verb, sort of means 'may you enjoy that name.' I once had some amazing boots, and a friend saw them, and she said, 'Eshkuvshem,' I think I've said that right, which means 'may they rip,' and I didn't understand why. It seemed quite a mean thing to be saying. She explained that that meant 'May they rip before you die,' like, 'They're lovely boots, but may you outlive them,' which is a kind of a nice message. And then there's, of course, those are all the blessings, but then it's the same optative that you use for curses. 

So all of the swear words, phrases use 'may you do whatever.' So that's an important part of grammar to understand these really deep-running parts of people's conversation. And then the admirative, which, like I said, is, I think, unique. To Albanian, is the other weird case, or weird at least to a non-Albanian speaker, which has two uses, but one of them is to convey that you don't have a piece of information firsthand, that you are getting this at secondhand, which is really quite an important case actually, and one that we could probably all, in these days of fake news, it would be good to know, like, when you're really sure and when you're just reporting something you've been told. But it's also used to sort of show astonishment of something, so you use it if you're saying "wow" for good or for bad. Those are the kinds of details that you don't learn those in your, probably not even in your first year of learning a language, but when you do get into them then you feel like you're really understanding some kind of secret parts of a mentality.

Stephanie Fuccio:

That admirative one, where you're admirative aspect, where you're talking about where you got the source of the information, is that similar to like reported speech in English? Where you're talking about like he said, she said kind of thing?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yes, but you just don't need to say the he said, she said. So you would just— I might say to you, "Pas ke ards dia," which means like— so if I said "Ke ards dia," this would mean "You came yesterday," but if I said "Pas ke ards dia," that means like, "I gather that you arrived yesterday. I don't have that for sure, but somebody told me that you arrived yesterday." I see, I see, I see.

Stephanie Fuccio:

So it doesn't necessarily direct it towards a specific source.

Stephanie Fuccio:

No, no.

Stephanie Fuccio:

As you were learning the language, were there any cultural insights that you got that surprised you either pleasantly or otherwise? Probably more so pleasantly.

Elizabeth Gowing:

I think the bit that the thing I enjoyed, and it's a slightly geeky thing to enjoy, but there's this kind of, there's this gender within. So obviously like many languages, Albanian divides words into masculine and feminine, but there seems to be the remnants of a kind of neuter, neutral gender because there's a whole group of words which masculine in the singular and then become feminine in the plural. So they sort of have this strange chimera kind of status. And lots of those words are the really elemental words of the language. So the words like water and wax and fat and cheese, so things that you can imagine have really come down from a very— been handed down through many generations of the basics. And I kind of like learning things like that so that you get to— you feel like you're part of a very long tradition of saying these words.

Stephanie Fuccio:

That's interesting. Yeah, because in English a lot of words go from like female singulars to plural male. So, but in Albanian there is also the opposite. Hrraa!

Elizabeth Gowing:

Okay.

Stephanie Fuccio:

From someone who's only been here about a month, one of the first things people mentioned about not just the language, but expressing people expressing themselves with the yes and no being opposite. But from what I've seen so far, the yes is not an exact left to right know that we would do in English. It's more of like a, of course, kind of head— it's hard to do this audibly, but sort of like if you're shrugging and you tilt your head at the same time. This seems to be what I'm seeing more of. Am I correct on this at all? Because I have a very limited sample right now.

Elizabeth Gowing:

I think it gets more and more emphasized the further south you go. So this issue of, as you say, people will say that you nod for no and you shake for yes, but in Kosovo that's That's not always the case. And even in Tirana, it's not always the case, but further south, it does seem to get more and more obvious. And I think the best way to sort of see it is if somebody responds to a genuine yes/no question that you really don't know the answer, and they don't say a word with it, then that really tests what your instinct is to how they reply. And it's certainly very obvious sometimes that this is not just a tilt, or this is not just, but you know, this is exactly what a British person would be doing to to say no, but they are meaning yes. And, and I'm now started in just using thumbs up and thumbs down as I, as I speak, because I realize that I must be giving off very confusing signals. So I always do that when I'm speaking with somebody I don't know. I kind of reinforce it with it.

Stephanie Fuccio:

And that has the same meaning then? That's not opposite?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yeah, although actually, possibly the PDK party, which is one of the governing parties, the thumbs up is their kind of, uh, particularly Hashim Tharji, the former president's, was his kind of gesture. So people It now has a slightly political kind of connotation if you give a thumbs up, which is not necessarily what I intended.

Stephanie Fuccio:

For the Albanian spoken and used in Kosovo versus in Albania, I imagine there's regional differences or dialectical differences. Are they very different or moderately different?

Elizabeth Gowing:0

If you go right to the south of Albania and then compare that with Kosovan Albanian, it can really be very different and enough to have people really struggling to understand one another. I mean, it is the same language. The two dialects are the Geg dialect in the north and the Tosk in the south. And one of the biggest differences is that Geg has an infinitive, and the infinitive is used to form the past and the future in Geg, whereas in Tosk they don't have an infinitive, and so they form the future and the past in different ways. And so that can make actually a huge difference. So for example, "I will go," in Geg, in Kosovo, that would be 'Kam me shku,' whereas in Tosk, in Albania and in the south, it would be 'Do te shkoy.' So in those 3 words, there are only 3 letters, in fact, that are shared. 'Do te shkoy,' 'Kam me shku.' I mean, in fact, the rule about how you use them is really simple. Once you've learned it, you can kind of be bilingual between those, but that's just one example. 

And then of course there are many, many vocabulary differences, particularly Albanian, because of its history in Albania, has absorbed a lot a lot of Italian words, both for nouns but also verbs and adjectives, like the word for car and the word for blue, which is 'macchina' and 'blu,' for example, whereas in Kosovo you would say 'ker' for car and you would say 'kaltar' for blue, so totally different word. And then in its turn, Kosovo has absorbed a lot of Serbian words because for the last 3 generations Kosovo has been part of Yugoslavia, or has been struggling not to be part of Yugoslavia, and so it's had that Serbian connection.. And so the lexical differences can be quite confusing. And even for basic things like the word for pen or the word for tissue, Kleenex, so kind of quite common nouns that you might need to ask for quite often are quite different. And genuinely people, it's incomprehensible, people just don't know that word for it. And so I quite often ran into that, and especially because quite a lot of my work's been with children. And so children generally have one word for one thing rather than, it's only later that they develop a wider vocabulary. So yeah, it is quite tricky, and the language was only unified in 1972, so I think that's really worth remembering. 

I mean, that's the year before I was born, and so it's only basically within my lifetime that this has been considered to be a unified language, which is why there isn't very much consensus about what is right and wrong, unlike in English where there's a whole worldwide industry based on what correct grammar is and what an IELTS score looks like and what's what materials can be used to teach the third conditional or whatever. And Albanian really doesn't have any of that paraphernalia because it's still— people often look at me when I say something and I can tell that I've not got it quite right, but they're definitely not correcting me. They just think, "Hmm, must be from a different village," you know, because I'm educated and they know I've got a university education and they feel that they haven't. 

Perhaps they assume that I'm right and that they're wrong because there's a lot of uncertainty about what "correct" means in terms of Albanian grammar. So that's another reason why actually learning Albanian is quite easy because it's not like you're falling into mistakes that would be very easily identified in English as mistakes. People are like, "Okay, I understand what you're saying. It's not how I'd have put it, but we can get along." And I've noticed that language flexibility from the get-go here is—

Stephanie Fuccio:

I've been in some countries where people will just try to communicate no matter what they do, whether it be hand gestures or drawings or different words, different languages, and some places where they're like, "No, you have to speak this language perfectly before I understand you." And in the first my first day or two here, I was just like, this is amazing. Like, anything that needs to be used, we're using. And because I have like 2 words in Albanian and they have a lot more English, and we both of us kind of recognize Italian. So I've just— in simple transactions, there were different things that we were doing, but things always got done and they were always super nice about it. And I was like, this is amazing. That kind of language flexibility is beautiful.

Elizabeth Gowing:

I think also that so many Albanians have had experience of living and working abroad, so even if probably not in an English-speaking country, but Albanians from Albania will have been in Italy or Greece, and people from Kosovo will have been in Germany or Switzerland and sometimes in the UK. And so people have had that experience of having to get by in a foreign language, so that gives you a tolerance and the flexibility for when other people are struggling.

Stephanie Fuccio:

And you had mentioned your, your work with children. Can you tell us more about that? Because from what I heard last night in an interview I was listening to, you went from possibly teaching one student to teaching a whole classroom full of like 20-some students.

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yeah, and I think we've now got over 600 kids, uh, into school now. So yeah, I'm the co-founder of the Ideas Partnership, which is charity, a nonprofit that works in Kosovo, and I'm a teacher by training. But as you say, it wasn't that I set out to, through the Ideas Partnership, to do a particular project or to, to do this project on education, but just by chance I met this one girl who, uh, was 9 at the time and who wanted to go to school, and the school wasn't allowing her to come because they said she was too late to register, that after the age of 9 you'd missed your chance. And so I was battling to try to change that ruling, because clearly in Kosovo, in the constitution, in terms of children's rights, of course they have the right to education until the age of 16. But I also wanted to teach her and get her to be able to fit in in the classroom. And then, as you say, she said, 'Can my friends come?' And then before we knew it, we had this classroom full of kids. Kids. 

And that was 10 years ago, but we've now continued the work in Fushkosov, which is the suburb of Pristina where that girl lived. And we're now in 3 other municipalities as well. And in fact, we've expanded our projects to— as soon as we got to know the community, we learned all kinds of other needs, including very high child mortality. So we now have a newborn maternal health program. We also have a kindergarten and not just support for school kids. 

We adults who want to go back to education, whether that's with basic literacy or going to high school or evening classes to get their high school diploma or whatever. So we've now got really quite a large, rich, rich sort of portfolio of ways of helping people to help themselves out of that poverty. But yes, it has meant that almost all of my work now is with people who are not formally educated and so don't have English, but also don't have necessarily grammatical Albanian, and it's mixed in with bits of Serbian and Turkish and bits of Roma language as well, because some of these families are from the Roma community. And so it's definitely enriched my vocabulary and forced me to get better at Albanian.

Stephanie Fuccio:

It's still just children that you're teaching now, those 600?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Well, 600 children we've got into the school, but our centre, our biggest centre, which is in Fushë Kosovë, we have about 300 people who come through the doors every week. And so most of those are children, but also we have these mums literacy classes, and we have— I also run a social enterprise, so there are 12 women who are employed through that, and they earn money from the sales of greetings cards and purses and bookmarks and bags and things they make, but on condition that their children go to school. So we're trying to break this cycle where those kids more often were going out through the rubbish, collecting garbage for recycling, or they were begging, and so they weren't in school. And so of course then when they grow up, they don't have the qualifications to be able to do anything else, and their own kids could then go through the garbage and go out begging. So we're trying to break that by using those women as the agents for change in their families and in their communities.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Speaking of bookmarks, you are also a writer and an avid reader. I'm laughing because there's so many different aspects aspects of your life that fit into so many of my different podcasts that I'm just like, ah! So yes, you are a writer. You have 6 books, is that correct?

Elizabeth Gowing:

I have 5 books. Yeah, I'm working on the 6th, but 5 of them are the same.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Oh, that was it. I was mentally thinking of that. Is there a language component or a language thread that runs through all of the books?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Oh, well, my first book is called Travels in Blood and Honey, and the subtitle is Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo. So on my first birthday in Kosovo, I was given this beehive as a gift. And so through that, I learned how to make make honey and how to look after the bees, but also I got to know a lot of these traditions of the villages and got to learn the rhythms of the land. And it got me out of the capital and into a very more traditional part of Kosovo. So it was a really transformational present. It wasn't not just because of the honey, but because of the experiences that led to. And so my, my book describes that experience, but each chapter I identified one or two words words that I had learnt in the course of what I narrated in the chapter. And so each chapter has the beginning, just like the focus, new word, and then most of them in Albanian, but a few Serbian words, because I, as I was starting to learn Serbian. 

So that's also something that's my love of language, I suppose, was flagged up there. And lots of people who've read the book have told me they really enjoyed feeling like they were being educated by just learning a new word every chapter. And I have a podcast myself with my partner, Rob, called A Coffee in the Accursed Mountains. Which is about life and culture with stories from Kosovo and Albania and Montenegro, which are the countries around these so-called Accursed Mountains. That's the name of the mountain range. And so in A Coffee in the Accursed Mountains, in each episode, we identify, you know, what's the word of the, of this episode, because we could see that people enjoyed just that bit of learning about a culture through its vocabulary.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Absolutely.

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yeah. I found your podcast.

Stephanie Fuccio:

The first week that I was here when I started getting obsessed with Mountain Tea. And I've been trying to find the northern version because the southern version is the one with the yellow leaves, right?

Elizabeth Gowing:

That's what I mean.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Yeah, so I've been drinking that obsessively. I've now got my husband hooked on it, and we not only make it, but we cook it. We leave it on the— because one of the waitresses told us if you actually cook it and leave it on the stove on low heat for a long time, the flavor comes out more. So we'll leave it on the stove all day and just keep adding hot water to to it. So we literally cook it all day and I'm obsessed with it, but I want to try the northern one at some point. Is there a huge difference between the two taste-wise?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yeah, completely. It's an entirely different flower. So the southern one is this plant called Sideritis and the northern one is marjoram basically, or oregano as you would call it in America. So the flavor is very different, but both delicious. And I think the— I mean, people make all kinds of claims for both kinds of mountain tea. For being good for your immunity and being good for chest complaints and for balancing your hormones. And I think I've read elsewhere, so not just about the tea, but in general that marjoram or oregano is good for skin. So definitely the women up in the mountains have the most beautiful skin and well after the age that down in the towns, it's everybody's getting wrinkly. They have this wonderful— I think it's worth drinking for that.

Stephanie Fuccio:

So going back to books for a second, you do also read in multiple languages. Is that correct?

Elizabeth Gowing:

I try to have a few books on the go at any one time. I try to have some poetry and a book, a sort of trashy novel, and the kind of good literature. And then I've usually got one on Kindle and one on audio as well. And I always try to have one in a foreign language as well. And generally that's Albanian, although occasionally I read French books, but Albanian is, it's really useful for me to be building that. This year I have read far less because of the pandemic. I was doing a lot of my reading as I was traveling and haven't been doing that traveling. But last year I read 57 books and 7 of them were Albanian, and that was, that's definitely a record, so I felt very proud of that.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Are any of your books written in or translated into Albanian?

Elizabeth Gowing:

No, one of them is being translated, but I don't know, it's taking quite a long time, so I'm not sure when it'll be out now. Yeah, my second book is called Edith and I: On the Trail of an Edwardian Traveller in Kosovo, and it's about Edith Durham, who is a British woman, who was a British woman from 100 years ago, who is very well known in Kosovo and Albania. There are schools named after her, roads named after her, and she was the first woman to appear on a Kosovan stamp. But in England, no one has heard of her. So it's a very strange situation that you have somebody who is British but is not known in her own country, and I wanted to follow the journeys that she she made at the turn of the 20th century around Kosovo and Albania, and then compare what my experiences were with hers. And so there is a publishing house who've started to translate that, but it's been going on for some time, so it might be a while before it comes out in Albanian.

Stephanie Fuccio:

Do you think you'll ever want to write a book in Albanian, as you're writing it at first, not just translating it afterwards?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yeah, I definitely haven't got to that stage yet. I, I used to have a column in the Pristina Insight, which is the English language newspaper in Kosovo, published by BIRN, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, and that had to be done in English and Albanian because they have an Albanian language version. And so I was always kind of daring myself to write it first in Albanian. But I think possibly the more, the more important it is to you to communicate carefully, the more likely it is that you will want to write in your native language because there you've obviously, you've got the most flexibility, you've got the widest vocabulary. English anyway has a wider vocabulary than Albanian does. So I think it's, it sort of feels like trying to dance with your feet tied together. Why would you do that? If you, when you can write exactly what you mean, and then you can work out how to say it in a different language. But it would be nice. I had my first dream in Albanian just over a year a year ago. So, I mean, that took me 12 and some years to get. So maybe my next goal is to write something in Albanian first. I mean, emails and those kinds of things, of course I write in Albanian first, but when you're wanting to choose your words really carefully and get your message really honed, like I do in my books or in a newspaper article, then I don't know, it hasn't worked for me yet to do it in Albanian first.

Stephanie Fuccio:

When you're using English and when you're using Albanian, do you feel differently in the different languages?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Definitely. Well, people say that I talk much faster in Albanian. Albanian, which is interesting, I guess, because I think Albanians talk faster. And so, and I do love, like, when I've been in England for a while— yesterday I ran a whole day of training in Albanian all day on Zoom. So I guess nowadays I'm actually using a lot of Albanian even when I'm in the UK. I remember there being times when I'd been in the UK for a stay and I hadn't used spoken Albanian at all in that time. And then just getting to the airport and doing those first bits of communication with the border officials or with taxi drivers or whatever, just enjoying the feel of it in my mouth, that it was back to something that felt comfortable. So I guess there is a thrill in using the language, yeah.

Stephanie Fuccio:

There's always some words, it seems, that are more suitable or more specific or more apt for a situation or a thing in some languages than in others. Are there any Albanian words that that you tend to use even when you're speaking in English, you'll slip into that word because it just exactly fits that thing?

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yeah, definitely. Although, like I said earlier, English has a wider vocabulary than Albanian does, mainly because English borrows from so many languages and Albanian has borrowed a lot less. There are some places where Albanian has a wider range of options, and the one that often comes up for me is words for support. And in English, we don't really have more than one way of saying support. And I talk about support a lot because of the work of our nonprofit. And so I'm constantly asking people for support or thanking them for their support, and often in Facebook posts, which I quite often do in two languages. And in English, as I say, we can just say support, which comes, I guess, from the idea of being something from underneath, the sup. And Albanian has two words, one of which is mbishtetië, which does have this sense of kind of vertical, being supported from beneath, but it also has the word perkrahië, which literally breaks down as being by your arm, so it's kind of like shoulder-to-shoulder support. I really like the fact that there's the idea is— I'm not sure that there is a difference in the usage between the two, but one could sort of see that sometimes you're supported by somebody actually holding you up, and sometimes you're supported by someone who's there at your side.

Stephanie Fuccio:

I never thought of that before, but there are those differences, but we don't have that distinction.

Elizabeth Gowing:

So yes, I really like the flexibility to do that. And then I think a word that I do use quite often, just because I love the sound of it, in fact it's a Turkish word, but it's been taken into Albanian, is "qalabalëk," which is such a nice word to say, which just means a lot of people, or a crowd, or you could use it on the roads, you could say that there's a lot of traffic. And so yeah, this one is a nice word to say.

Stephanie Fuccio:

That is a fun one to say. That's a nice mouthfeel. Qalabalëk? Is that it? Qalabalëk. Fagluc.

Elizabeth Gowing:

I like that.

Stephanie Fuccio:

I heard years and years ago when I lived in Vietnam, I heard from somebody who was a native French speaker that there was this word that meant like if you're done eating, like you're full, but you want one more bite just because the flavor is so good. There's a word for that in French and we don't have that in English. And I'd never— I don't know French at all, but the fact that that existed, I was like, that tells you something about the cuisine.

Elizabeth Gowing:

Yeah, yeah, great, great.

Stephanie Fuccio:

So I think that the different support vocabulary tells you something about Albanian culture as well.

Elizabeth Gowing:

Definitely, yeah. And the sort of solidarity that there is in different families.