Features typical of Lab include the unrounding of Albanian /y/ to /i/, thus merging it with the /i/ phoneme, and a velar articulation for Albanian gj and q. As such, in areas where Lab is less influenced by Standard Albanian, Albanians from elsewhere may be shocked to hear words like gjyshi pronounced as gishi. Likewise, Lab Albanians may say they speak "shkip", not shqip. Lab also has some features that are more typical of Gheg dialects than Tosk ones: it preserves the Old Albanianvowel length distinction. Although the loss of nasal vowels in Tosk is said to be a diagnostic feature separating Southern Albanian from Northern Albanian, Albanian linguists Dilo Sheper and Gjinari have reported that there are nasal vowels present in the Lab dialects of Kurvelesh and Himare, which would mean there are in fact Tosk dialects with nasal vowels, contrary to prior assumptions, although some Albanian writers like Paçarizi expressed uncertainty about the reports. Menela Totoni, meanwhile, has detected the presence of nasal vowels in the extreme southern town of Borsh. Paçarizi notes that the presence of nasal vowels in Lab might imply that the loss of nasals in Tosk can no longer be viewed as the taxonomical difference between Gheg and Tosk, and that it may have occurred in the majority of Tosk dialects after Tosk had already split from Gheg. Standard Albanian dh may also be represented as a dark ll in many Lab dialects, leading madhe to be pronounced as. Certain Lab dialects shift the Albanian schwa to a back vowel, open-mid back unrounded vowel|, while others merge it with e /ɛ/. Many Lab dialects also pronounce the schwa at the end of words, saying instead of for pesë. Albanian e/ɛ/ may also become a schwa in Lab before nasal consonants.
Lexical
Lab Albanian uses different past participles than Standard Albanian, which is based on a dialect of Tosk proper, specifically the one from the ethnographic region of Dangellia due to its usage by Albanian nationalist writers. The past participle of marr is marrur and the past participle of them is themur, rather than thënë.
Morphological and syntactical
Lab and its sister dialect, Cham, have been found to lack many of the particularities that wider Albanian has in morphological rules and syntactical patterns. Some but not all Lab dialects lack the admirative mood, typically considered a curious and unique particularism of Albanian although there are also related phenomena in some Bulgarian dialects. Lab has exerted some influence on Standard Albanian, for example causing the emergence of the short particle due to its use for compound past tenses. Laberishtja also is peculiar in that certain Lab dialects may have use of a "have" + subjunctive formation of the future tense, which is more typically characteristic of remote Gheg dialects such as the Upper Reka dialect. Although the idea that the Gheg/Tosk split is the oldest and most significant dialectal division in Albanian is widely viewed as canon, Lab has been found to exhibit certain "Gheg" grammatical characteristics. Features that are typical of Gheg but not Tosk dialects but which are nevertheless found in Lab include the presence of the compound perfect and the pluperfect.
History
It is believed that Lab Albanian split from its sibling dialects of Cham, Arvanitika and Arbereshe some time in the Middle Ages. Since then, its features have evolved through a variety of influences: language contact with Greek and specifically the Himariote dialect, isolation in mountainous regions and influence from Gheg dialects as Gheg speakers migrated to Lab areas in the Late Middle Ages and during the Ottoman era.
