| Summary: | One of the most important acts of our national Renaissance is, without doubt, the effort of the Istanbul Albanian intellectuals to create for our language a unified alphabet, based on Latin letters. These efforts that had started from the seventh decade of the XIX century, were successfully coronated in February 1789. At that time, an Alphabet Commission, with members such as Hasan Tahsini, Vaso Pasha, Koto Hoxhi, Jani Vreto, Sami Frashëri etc., from four proposed alphabets, chose a Latin based one, elaborated by S. Frashëri, based on the principle “a simple letter for each phoneme of Albanian”. According to him, the adoption of the Latin alphabet as a basis is explained by the fact that “Albania is a piece of Europe, …therefore Albanian should also be written with European letters, i.e. with Latin letters”. The Istanbul Alphabet, known as the alphabet of the “Society for the printing of Albanian books” (‘Shoqëri e të Shtypurit Shkronja Shqip’, founded in Istanbul on October 12th, 1879), was hailed by Albanian cultural circles outside Albania as a major cultural event and had wide coverage in the Renaissance press. Various Albanian newspapers wrote about it, beginning with Anasats Kullurioti’s “I foni tis Alvanias”, and continuing later on by the Nikolla Naço’s newspaper “Shqipëtari”, De Rada’s “La nazione Albanese”, Visar Dodani’s “Shqipëria, and Faik Konica’s “Albania” journal as well as Kristo Luarasi’s “Kalendai Kombiar” etc. Positive evaluations of this alphabet continued for about two decades. According to researchers who have dealt with this issue, the Istanbul alphabet fulfills the scientific criterion, because it relies on the phonetic principle “a simple letter for each separate sound”; fulfills the political criterion, as it excludes the Greek and Arabic alphabets; fulfills the cultural criterion by choosing the Latin alphabet “as an alphabet used by many peoples of the world”. As for the practical side, Sami says that “it could be learned more easily and books could be printed with it anywhere”. But ...
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