Gjuhë Të Huaja
The one thing I’ve least expected while working as an attorney is how much of an investigator you got to be. Clients usually tell their stories in bits and pieces, and you must piece together your own timeline. It’s an absolute God send when you have documentation that backs up their claims as you can create a timeline so you can effectively represent them. The worst is when a client lies to you, and it happens way more than it should which is unfortunate as you get left in the dark while you’re zealously representing them. While in law school, I thought it would be a rare occurrence, but it happens way more than it should.
Spending enough time in an area, you start to really pick up on dialectical differences that are less obvious. A lot of Kosovars comment that I use a lot of Italian words, and I didn’t even realize many of the words that I spoke in Albanian are Italian words that have wiggled their way into our lexicon. I’ll call my wallet portofoli, which comes from the Italian portafoglio, or I call a washing machine a lavatriqe. A traffic light is a semafora from the Italian semaforo, highway is autostrada, refrigerators are frigoriferi from the Italian frigorifero, note, we don’t typically end our words with -o in Albanian. But I will give you an exception, if you want to say you're taking a stroll, the word for stroll in Albanian is xhiro, which comes from the Italian word giro. If you want to use the original Albanian word, then it is shetis, but you can also use that word for sightseeing, while xhiro is used specifically for going for a stroll.
I personally think people from Pristina speak very cleanly. They obviously have a Kosovar Albanian dialect which can be difficult for someone who doesn’t know the Gheg dialect, but it’s very easy to understand regardless. I personally think if somebody doesn’t understand the Gheg dialect at all, then they’re just acting snobby as most pop and rap artists are Northern Albanian or from Kosovo, so you’d expect people to be accustomed to it. Speaking of dialectics, we occasionally get people from surrounding villages and their accents can admittedly be hard to understand. My ego is left intact if a colleague of mine says that they also had difficulty understanding someone’s accent, but when you have to understand someone’s accent and they are telling you a story in bits and pieces, it can make your job very difficult. When somebody is worked up because they’ve been denied benefits, it’s not really a good time to ask what a word they used meant, so you really need to listen closely and use context clues if necessary.
I had some family visit me as they’ve never been to Pristina, and I had the room as my apartment is pretty big. They really enjoyed the stay, although it was odd being the tour guide this time as they always were the ones to show me around Albania. Fortunately, Pristina isn’t too big to the point that it’s tiring and impossible to get around, and it’s great to live in as it’s not as noisy and hectic as Tirana and the climate is way cooler. It might not be a bad idea to work as a tour guide during my free time to make a few extra euros.