In the first decade of the twentieth Century, Albanian was written in three different scripts: Arabic, Greek, and Roman, and in multiple orthographies.
In 1908 fifty Albanian delegates gathered in the central Balkan city of Monastir to agree upon a script and an orthography for their language. In this sociolinguistic study of language factions in a focused setting, lanalyze the issues, process, anddivisions that arose, despite intense politicalpressure to come to agreement. Historians have explained the factions in terms of dialect differences. Ishow that dialect cannot possibly explain the divisions.
Rather Ipropose that the divisions relate to differences in "scriptal environments" of adult work settings of delegates, where notions of "distinctive script" carried different associations.