I decided to practice Albanian by translating pictures of old signs from communist Albania that Ive gathered from around the internet. Enjoy and Rrofte Populli Shqiptar!

mbrojme is 1st person plural from of mbroj which is to defend or protect. mbrojtje mjedisit means environmental protection, for example.

Pushteti is a noun form of the verb pushtoj which is a fun word because in english it means all of these things: overwhelm,to envelop, to invade, to stradlle. Pushteti means somthing like power/stength/authority. It is in nominative singular case and is the subject. Popullor is the adjective of Populli which means people. Lind is a verb that means to be born and here it is in the 3rd person singular past tense. nga gryka e pushkes literally means “from barrel of rifle.” Pushkes is in the genitive case and has the e infront of it because in albanian you have to alter the beginning of adjectives as well as the end depending on case and gender and number and definiteness of the noun it modifies.

Shqipërisë is the gentiive (possessive) form of Shqiperia which is how you say Albania in Albanian. The adjective is shqiptar. To pronounce the Sh and q at the beginning… its complicated. Q in albanian makes kind of mix between ch and sh.

Popullin is the word popull again but is in the definite accusative case because it is the direct object. Sometimes in albanian you see abbreviations declined. For example, in this case “PPSH” would be “PPSH-in.” ShBA is how you say USA in shqip. If it is definite and nominative in a sentence it becomes ShBA-ja and if it is genitive (used to show possession) it is ShBA-es (like pushkes in the previous image).

The subjunctive in albanian is pretty easy. It only differs from the indicative case in 2nd person and 3 person singular. you just add a

“të” before the verb and you got yourself a subjunctive tense.

the albanian word order is “Marches Albania Socialist” which is exactly reversed from the english word order. Albanian is a heavily inflected language which means that the each word is modified or tuned by the role it plays in the sentence. this means you can put the words in almost any order without loss of meaning.

Enver Hoxha is that prominent guy with the cool jacket and hat. The word friend in albanian “shok” was employed by communist Albania to be the word for “Comrade”. Thus, Enver Hoxha was called “Shoku Enver” and the word shoku itself became a title used in ways such as “shoket punetor” or worker comrades.

I hope you enjoyed this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. mirupafshim! (the albanian word for good bye translates as something like “great we saw eachother!”)

See one thousand more photos of communist albania here