Sound Change in Albanian Monolinguals and Albanian–English Sequential Bilingual Returnees in Tirana, Albania

This research investigated contrastive perception of L1 phonological categories in Albanian–English bilinguals who returned to Albania after living abroad for over on average a decade. In Standard Albanian, there are phonemic contrasts between /c/ and /tʃ/, /ɫ/ and /l/, and /ɹ/ and /r/. These phonemic contrasts do not occur in English. Using a “real speech” binary minimal pair identification task, we compared the accuracy and response times of bilingual returnees against functional Albanian monolinguals who had never lived abroad. Results showed that (1) reaction times for /c/ versus /tʃ/ were longest for both groups, indicating that this contrast was “harder” than the other contrasts. Surprisingly, (2) bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in accurately identifying /c/ versus /tʃ/; and (3) no significant group differences were found for the other two phonemic contrasts. In combination with other research showing that Albanian is undergoing a merger of /c/ and /tʃ/, our findings suggest that this merger is more advanced in monolinguals than bilinguals—probably because the bilinguals were abroad when the merger started. Examination of variation within the bilinguals indicated that (4) the younger the speaker was when they left Albania, and the more recently they had returned, the lower their accuracy was in identifying the laterals. These phonological findings enhance our understanding of perceptual L1 attrition whilst underlining the need to examine language change in the country of origin in L1 attrition research.