Zhvendosja e trajektores së stigmës: dukuria shibboleth në shqipen bashkëkohore
Shifting the Trajectory of Stigma: The Shibboleth Phenomenon in Contemporary Albanian

Summary/Abstract: In various academic circles heteroglossic constructions and repertoires driven in part by speaker agency have been in the limelight throughout the past few years. These amalgams, including those exhibiting regional variation and areal features with elements of contactinduced language change, are often accompanied by concerns of destabilization of hegemonic language ideologies, thereby testing purist stances that such constructions demonstrate linguistic contamination and deficiencies. The resulting configurations also may involve diaglossia, whereby dialectal forms are enmeshed with the standard. In this paper we turn our attention to a less frequently studied realm, namely Albanian speech communities where employment of various prescribed constructions indexed with varying degrees of stigma and prestige serve as shibboleths, whereby the admittance of given marginalized linguistic elements into mainstream discourse is obstructed, including when centripetal elements are concomitant with the centrifugal. Influenced by language attitudes entrenched in ortholinguistic standard-gazing gatekeeping, among other variables, select diaglossic configurations containing (once) proscribed forms, e.g. si me thënë (‘as/like to say’; si të thuash; si me thanë), may be in the process of qualifying as felicitous divergences from the standard, particularly when compared to an utterance such as sime shku(e) (‘as/like to go’; si të shkosh). The aim of this paper is to examine dynamic spoken and written modes of contemporary Albanian, including in the digital agora and online corpora, where destandardizing and demotic shibboleths surface.

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