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We live in an era where the university system is undergoing great changes owing to developments in financing policies and research priorities, as well as changes in the society in which this system is embedded. This change toward a more market-oriented university, which also has immediate effects in academic peripheries such as the Balkans, the Middle East, or South-East Asia, is of great influence for the pedagogical practice of "less profitable" academic areas such as the Humanities: philosophy, languages, sociology, anthropology, history. Because of the absence of a historically grounded establishment of the Humanities, academic peripheries, usually accompanied by a weak civil society infrastructure, seem to offer the most fertile ground for rethinking the Humanities, their pedagogical practice, and their politics, as well as the greatest threats, such as the ongoing capitalization of research, and profitability as the norm of educational achievement. The sprawling presence of for-profit universities and in academic peripheries such as Albania and Kosovo is indicative of this problematic, as are consistent underfunding of universities and the relentless budget cuts in American and English, and to a lesser extent European, universities. Motivations for this ongoing attack on the university are often driven by a political system or a politics with an aggressive stance to critical thought.

The essay is part of a research contained in the volume Lessico degli italianismi nella lingua Albanese, in press, which updates the works in this field through a systematic scrutiny of bilingual dictionaries by both Albanian authors, from Bardhi (1635) to Bashkimi (1908), and Italian authors, from Da Lecce (1702) to Cordignano (1938). The research has also taken into account monolingual dictionaries from 1954 up to the most recent ones, both normative and non normative ones (2006), in order to trace the presence of new Italianisms introduced since the democratic turn. It is important to notice that italianizëm starts being recorded in 2002. Etymological studies by Miklosich (1871) and E. Çabej (1974-2006), besides Meyer's etymological dictionary (1891), have also been referred to. The present research makes use of literary works, the first translations, some contemporary novels and newspapers in order to witness the vitality of the new entries. The research also includes specific vocabulary traced in terminological dictionaries in the field of music, mechanics, church, law, economy and cookery: altogether words which, although not fully accepted in normative dictionaries, are now part of the language use.