Formidable barriers frustrate Albanian leaders' efforts to…

Formidable barriers frustrate Albanian leaders' efforts to instill in their people an Albanian rather than an Ottoman identity.

Divided into four vilayets, Albanians have no common geographical or political nerve center.

The Albanians' religious differences force nationalist leaders to give the national movement a purely secular character that alienates religious leaders.

The most significant factor uniting the Albanians, their spoken language, lacks a standard literary form and even a standard alphabet.

Each of the three available choices, the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts, imply different political and religious orientations opposed by one or another element of the population.

In 1878 there are no Albanian-language schools in the most developed of the Albanian- inhabited areas—Gjirokaster, Berat, and Vlore—where schools conduct classes either in Turkish or in Greek.