The Albanian language is traditionally divided between the Gheg dialect to the geographic north and the now Standard Tosk dialect to the geographic south. Recent literature of the historically isolated dialect of Malsia Madhe (Dedvukaj 2022) has revealed a subdialect which has not undergone the specific phonological sound changes seen in both the Standard Tosk and Modern Gheg dialects. The Tosk dialect is distinct from the dialects of Gheg and Malsia Madhe (Malsia) in that it contains homorganic nasal-stop clusters in positions where they did not occur in various Proto-Indo-European (PIE) reconstructed forms. Three historical processes and the distinct ways in which nasal-stop clusters appear in Tosk are discussed: homorganic nasal assimilation that occurred in the 16th–18th centuries, the insertion of epenthetic stops due to sonority constraints and analogical extension, and constraints on the analogy that can be attributed to the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which restricts Tosk Albanian to one nasal-stop cluster within a single morpheme.

I have analysed the vowels /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʌ, u, ʊ, ɔ, ɑ/ across multiple regions in the state of Michigan. By organizing them by demographics of age, region, population-density, and sex, I identified that the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS) is reversing as indicated in other areas of the Inland North, but its distribution among the demographic categories and the mechanism of reversal are inconsistent across Michigan and the rest of the Inland North. On account of this, I propose that we are not observing a “reversal” of the NCS, but a series of “counter-shifts.”

While Albanian has traditionally been marginalized in Indo-European (IE) studies, this has been due to the extensive borrowing in the Tosk Albanian dialect used by previous literature. However, the Malsia Madhe dialect of Albanian better preserves the phonotactics and lexicon of Proto-Albanian, Proto Illyrian, and Proto-Indo-European. Therefore, Malsia Madhe Albanian should be utilized when discussing the history of Albanian and its place in IE studies.