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