Contact linguistics in the context of Calque

In cultural anthropology and cultural geography, cultural diffusion, as conceptualized by Leo Frobenius in his 1897/98 publication "Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis",is the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, art,religions, technologies, languages—between individuals, whether within a single culture or from one culture to another.It is distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a specific culture. Examples of cultural diffusion include the spread of the war chariot and of iron smelting in ancient times, and the use of automobiles and Western business suits in the 20th century.

Proto-Albanian is the ancestral reconstructed language of Albanian, before the Gheg–Tosk dialectal diversification (before c. 600 CE). Albanoid and other Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region. Whether descendants or sister languages of what was called Illyrian by classical sources, Albanian and Messapic, on the basis of shared features and innovations, are grouped together in a common branch in the current phylogenetic classification of the Indo-European language family. The precursor of Albanian can be considered a completely formed independent IE language since at least the first millennium BCE, with the beginning of the early Proto-Albanian phase.

Proto-Albanian is reconstructed by way of the comparative method between the Tosk and Gheg dialects and between Albanian and other Indo-European languages, as well as through contact linguistics studying early loanwords from and into Albanian and structural and phonological convergences with other languages. Loanwords into Albanian treated through its phonetic evolution can be traced back as early as the first contacts with Doric Greek (West Greek) since the 7th century BCE, but the most important of which are those from Latin (dated by De Vaan to the period 167 BCE to 400 CE) and from Slavic (dated from 600 CE onward). The evidence from loanwords allows linguists to construct in great detail the shape of native words at the points of major influxes of loans from well-attested languages.