Standard Albanian has 7 vowels and 29 consonants. Like English, Albanian has dental fricatives /θ/ (like the th in thin) and /ð/ (like the th in this), written as th and dh, which are rare cross-linguistically.
Gheg uses long and nasal vowels, which are absent in Tosk, and the mid-central vowel ë is lost at the end of the word. The stress is fixed mainly on the last syllable. Gheg n (femën: compare English feminine) changes to r by rhotacism in Tosk (femër).
Consonants[]
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | velar. | ||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | (ŋ) | |||||
| Plosive | voiceless | p | t | k | |||||
| voiced | b | d | ɡ | ||||||
| Affricate | voiceless | t͡s | t͡ʃ | c͡ç | |||||
| voiced | d͡z | d͡ʒ | ɟ͡ʝ | ||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | θ | s | ʃ | h | |||
| voiced | v | ð | z | ʒ | |||||
| Approximant | l | ɫ | j | ||||||
| Flap | ɾ | ||||||||
| Trill | r | ||||||||
Notes:
- The contrast between flapped r and trilled rr is the same as in Spanish or Armenian. In most of the dialects, as also in standard Albanian, the single "r" changes from an alveolar flap /ɾ/ into a retroflex flap [ɽ], or even an alveolar approximant [ɹ] when it is at the end of a word.
- The palatal nasal /ɲ/ corresponds to the Spanish ñ and the French and Italian gn. It is pronounced as one sound, not a nasal plus a glide.
- The ll sound is a velarised lateral, close to English dark L.
- The letter ç is sometimes written ch due to technical limitations because of its use in English sound and its analogy to the other digraphs xh, sh, and zh. Usually it is written simply c or more rarely q with context resolving any ambiguities.
- The position of q and gj sound is not clear. Many speakers merge them into the palatoalveolar sounds ç and xh. This is especially common in Northern Gheg, but is increasingly the case in Tosk as well. Other speakers reduced them into /j/ in consonant clusters, such as in the word fjollë, which before standardization was written as fqollë ( < Medieval Greek φακιολης).
- The ng can pronounced as /ŋ/ in final position, otherwise is an allophone of n before k and g.
- Before q and gj, the n is always pronounced /ɲ/ but this is not reflected in the orthography.
- /θ, ð, ɫ/ are interdental.
Vowels[]
| IPA | Description | Written as | English approximation |
|---|---|---|---|
| i | Close front unrounded vowel | i | seed |
| ɛ | Open-mid front unrounded vowel | e | bed |
| a | Open central unrounded vowel | a | father, Spanish casa |
| ə | Schwa | ë | about, the |
| ɔ | Open-mid back rounded vowel | o | law |
| y | Close front rounded vowel | y | French tu, German Lüge |
| u | Close back rounded vowel | u | boot |
Schwa[]
Although the Indo-European schwa (ə or -h2-) was preserved in Albanian, in some cases it was lost, possibly when a stressed syllable preceded it. Until the standardization of the modern Albanian alphabet, in which the schwa is spelled as ë, as in the work of Gjon Buzuku in the 16th century, various vowels and gliding vowels were employed, including ae by Lekë Matrënga and é by Pjetër Bogdani in the late 16th and early 17th century. The schwa in Albanian has a great degree of variability from extreme back to extreme front articulation. Within the borders of Albania, the phoneme is pronounced about the same in both the Tosk and the Gheg dialect due to the influence of standard Albanian. However, in the Gheg dialects spoken in the neighbouring Albanian-speaking areas of Kosovo and Macedonia, the phoneme is still pronounced as back and rounded.