Chapter 1 discusses the basics of Albanian history. Is it a history of a space or of an ethnic community? The spatial expansion and spatial concepts as well as the definition of the term Albanian are discussed. The history of Albanophones in the southwestern Balkans is the focus of this section. Albanian history prior to 1912 is not the history of a state, but of Albanians and their diverse contacts with other language groups with whom they lived in close contact and with whom they shared extentive cultural exchanges. Due to the lack of written sources, the Albanian language has been the most important document in understanding Albanian cultural history. In addition, the modern national self-image of Albanians is based on language. Accordingly, the linguistic dimension of Albanian history is discussed in some detail. Closely related to this are politically sensitive questions of settlement and migration history: Where did the ancestors of contemporary Albanians live in antiquity? Are they autochthonous or immigrant? We develop a model of the history of cultural integration in the southwestern Balkans in the context of these questions.

The full range of internal dialect divisions within Indo-European that Albanian potentially enters into are surveyed here and shown to be complex and multifaceted. Nonetheless, it is argued that the overall evidence, based on the criterion of significant shared innovations, points to a particularly close connection between Albanian and Greek. It is further argued that this connection constitutes a subdivision within a discernible Palaeo-Balkanic subgroup that includes Messapic, Phrygian, and Armenian and possibly other fragmentarily known languages. This qualitative assessment of how Albanian fits in dialectally within the larger family matches results reported from computational phylogenetic investigation.