2024: The Year of SkyEncrochat and "popular" linguists, the gravediggers of Albanian

Alfred Lela

Oxford's Word of the Year for 2024 was 'brain rot,' chosen to mark the global population's long, almost unconscious journey into social media and the internet. The word is a 19th-century throwback, first used by American writer Henry David Thoreau.

If we were to search the virtual engine for the most used words in the media-political and widespread debate in Albania for the year 2024, we would wander somewhere between “wiretapping,” “arrests,” and “SkyEncrochat.” The latter is one of the encrypted communication platforms on smartphones, which in the end did not turn out to be so (encrypted), as European services managed to decrypt the conversations between crime bosses and their soldiers. What perhaps caught the eye of the intelligence and security services but certainly did not surprise them was the mastery of the Albanian language, an otherwise small dialect, in these communications.

This was consistent with the data and suspicion, now not so new, that Albanian organized crime is a European and transglobal phenomenon. If this is a given for the services, or even for crime researchers, for Albanians, the fact that the leaked conversations are not simply dialogues between criminals is valid. Quite the opposite, they prove the criminalization of the political system, but also the police and the media. The appearance in these conversations of several former deputies of the Socialist Party, in an attempt to kill each other, or other rivals, in the fight for revenge, economic and territorial domination, and more seriously than that, the exposure of a legislator from the majority in the Durrës district as a candidate of the powerful gangs of the area, alarm everyone about the fatality of an occult connection between organized crime and politics.

Shown in a few lines, MP Jurgis Cyrbja, third on the Durrës list, which Prime Minister Rama heads, was not just the will of one of the city's gangs but a competition with another gang in the area to prove that their candidate, i.e., Cyrbja, was ranked higher on the list and this proved that the influence and connection with Rama was more substantial.  

This is the infection of Albania's political and social consciousness, significantly escalating in the decade of left-wing socialist governance of the last decade. A brain rot that sees economic empowerment and preserving power and territory as the only platforms for social and individual existence. Of an alarming scale, although less harmful, is also the bastardization of Albanian as a language. Those who have read the transcripts of the conversations, even though they are Albanian speakers, have found it challenging to decipher the dialogues filled with hackneyed, distorted, primitivized words, a new slang that weaves the language of an Albanian minority, which is not educated in knowledge or education, but in vanity, vegetation, and crime. This may seem to many like an elitist treatment, but there is a connection between the two: the corrupted consciousness and the bastardized language. It is not, therefore, an attempt to belittle dialectal or simple Albanians, and proof of this can serve as a conversation with any elderly person in any province of Albania. Their language is primitive and straightforward but never vulgar. In the language of the elderly, an Albanian still lives where the social consciousness of the Albanian lives as original and autochthonous. They are the last splendor of Albania before our elders became part of the deputies of the Albanian parliament for the previous 12 years and the characters of the decrypted SkyEncrochat files.

In this sense, the alarm for political and linguistic awareness is of the scale of a national crisis.

In parallel with these developments, having a life of its own, with the indiscretion that usually accompanies all nonsense, a second brain rot has circulated in the Albanian public communication space: the artificial elevation of Albanian as a divine language, the oldest, the first, the most important among the world's languages, the language of languages, that is.

While Albanian is being discredited in the present (Parliament, conversations on Encrochat, Big Brother, online platforms), in virtuality - say the merchants of its antiquity - it shines. The latter, linguist Ardian Vehbiu, is called the "tale-tellers of Albanian." If you are interested, you can also find books with the same title in bookstores. He baptizes them that way to mark that tales and myths cannot undo reality and even help it hide behind a foggy mirror that damages judgment and diminishes the problem.

The ancient and the new Albanian do not meet anywhere. They are two parallel languages ​​that do not explain the past but threaten the future. They do not predict, they do not analyze, but first, they imagine an Albania, which, even if it had existed, as they are telling us, does not help us in the present or the future and, second, they reveal an Albania that threatens us precisely from the future.

This threat is revealed by the fact that their promoters, such as E. Kocaqi, A. Dalipaj, M. Mema, S. Guri, and some others, are praised and followed on social networks as the messiahs of history and language that never was; they are thus prophets of a past without a future. For this reason, the simulation of language and history was invented. As a rule, evidence does not need simulations. The language that is, the one that has existed until now, that communicates the soul of the Albanian minority, is under the yoke of a minute and general bastardization.

Albanians are nothing more than Albanian, their language. Its simulation from antiquity, by linguists and "popular" historians, and the stimulation of its undoing through a political-media-educational system, which is increasingly populated not by an aristocracy (here in the sense of the best), but by a kakistocracy (the rule of the worst).

Nothing demonstrates this better than language.