Albania, on a passport-by-passport count, has about 2.7 million people inside its borders. The number of Albanians living outside Albania — counted across Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Turkey, Australia, and dozens of smaller communities — is more than twice that. Most estimates of the global Albanian diaspora run between seven and ten million, depending on whether the count includes ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Montenegro, and how far back into the centuries it reaches for diaspora descendants.
What follows is a country-by-country walk through where Albanians actually live, how each community got there, and what holds the whole mërgata — the diaspora; literally “the migration” — together as something more than a list of expatriates. The framing is US-centered because that is where most of our readers are, but the story is global.
We will keep it neutral on the contested geopolitical questions — the status of Kosovo, the Çamëria question on the Greek–Albanian border, the North Macedonia naming debate — and stick to demographic facts. The community is plural by religion (Catholic, Orthodox, Sunni, Bektashi, and secular), plural by dialect (Gheg and Tosk), and plural by country of origin. The diaspora reflects all of it.
What is the Albanian diaspora?
The Albanian diaspora is the global community of Albanians and people of Albanian descent living outside the Republic of Albania. The Albanian-language term most commonly used is mërgata. An older term, kurbet — historically, the practice of going abroad for work, with the men leaving and the women keeping the household — is still used by older Albanians to describe the same idea with a different texture.
Two boundaries matter when counting the diaspora.
The first is whether you count only Albanian citizens or ethnic Albanians more broadly. Roughly 1.6 million ethnic Albanians live in Kosovo, about 500,000 in North Macedonia, and around 30,000 in Montenegro, depending on how the census line is drawn. None of these are emigrants from Albania — they are populations that have lived continuously in those regions for centuries, on land that is part of the historic Albanian-speaking world. Most diaspora counts include them.
The second is whether you count diaspora descendants. The Arbëreshë of southern Italy descend from refugees who arrived after 1448; their families have been Italian citizens for centuries, and many no longer speak the language fluently, but they are commonly counted as part of the diaspora. The same logic applies to fourth-generation Albanian Americans in Boston whose great-grandfathers worked in Massachusetts mills.
The most cited working figure is roughly 7–10 million Albanians worldwide, against an Albania-resident population of about 2.7 million (Albanian diaspora — Wikipedia). The number is large and the math is approximate, but the order of magnitude is real: most Albanians, depending on how you count, live outside Albania.
Where Albanians live outside Albania
A rough country-by-country table, drawing on national statistics offices and community estimates. Ranges where the count is contested.
- Italy — about 440,000–480,000 Albanian citizens, plus roughly 100,000 Arbëreshë of 15th-century descent.
- Greece — estimated 400,000–700,000, mostly post-1991 arrivals; the single largest national host community at peak.
- Germany — roughly 350,000–500,000 ethnic Albanians, the largest concentration in northern Europe.
- Switzerland — about 200,000–300,000, predominantly of Kosovar origin.
- United Kingdom — 140,000 or more, weighted heavily toward the post-1999 Kosovar wave.
- United States — 224,000 by the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS B04006); community estimates 750,000–1,000,000.
- Turkey — estimated 500,000–1.3 million ethnic Albanian descendants from Ottoman-era and 20th-century migrations.
- Australia — about 30,000, with established communities in Melbourne, Sydney, and the Shepparton region of Victoria.
- Canada — roughly 36,000 (2021 census), concentrated in the greater Toronto area and Montreal.
- Argentina — small but historic; the Albanian Orthodox parish of Buenos Aires was founded in 1928.
- Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, France — communities in the tens of thousands each, mostly post-1991.
Together, these numbers add to a global diaspora that comfortably exceeds the resident population of Albania itself.
The migration waves that built it
Albanian emigration is not one story. It is at least five, layered over six centuries.
The Arbëresh wave (1448 onward). After the death of the national hero Skanderbeg in 1468 and the Ottoman consolidation of Albanian territory, tens of thousands of Albanians fled across the Adriatic to the Kingdom of Naples. They settled in roughly fifty villages across southern Italy and built a community that has lasted nearly six hundred years.
The Ottoman kurbet and emigration (1500s–1912). Under Ottoman rule, Albanians moved throughout the empire as soldiers, administrators, and migrant workers. Large communities formed in Istanbul, Egypt (notably the dynasty of Muhammad Ali Pasha, of Albanian origin), and parts of Anatolia. Kurbet — going abroad to earn — became a structural feature of village economies in the southern and central highlands.
The factory wave (1880s–1920s). Young, single men, mostly from the Korçë region, left for Boston and the New England mill towns. The first known Albanian immigrant to the US, Kolë Kristofori, arrived between 1884 and 1886. A community-led 1907 count put 1,300 Albanians in Massachusetts alone. The institutions founded in this wave — Kombi (1906), Dielli (1909), and Vatra (1912) — still operate.
The sealed border (1945–1990). Enver Hoxha’s government sealed Albania off from the world for forty-five years. Emigration from Albania proper essentially stopped. Albanians from Yugoslav-controlled Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Montenegro, however, continued to leave — for Switzerland, Germany, and the US — under different pressures.
The 1991 collapse. When the regime fell, a tidal exit followed. Roughly 25,000 Albanians left through Western embassies in Tirana and by boat to Italy in 1990–91. Through the 1990s, hundreds of thousands more emigrated, mostly to Italy and Greece. The Albanian-citizen populations in those two countries today are almost entirely a product of this decade.
The 1998–1999 Kosovo war. The conflict displaced roughly a million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Many returned after the war, but a substantial share stayed abroad in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. The 20,000 Kosovar refugees admitted to the US through Fort Dix are part of this wave.
Today. Direct emigration has slowed since 2010, though student and professional migration to Germany, the UK, and the US continues. The diaspora now grows mostly through births to families already abroad.
Italy and the Arbëreshë — the oldest diaspora
Italy holds two distinct Albanian communities, and conflating them is the most common mistake people make about the diaspora there.
The first is the Arbëreshë — descendants of 15th-century refugees who fled the Ottoman conquest of the Albanian lands. They settled in southern Italy under the protection of King Alfonso V of Aragon and built around fifty villages across Calabria, Sicily, Puglia, Basilicata, and Molise. The community numbers roughly 100,000 today. They still speak Arbërisht, an archaic form of Tosk Albanian preserved through six centuries of isolation from the homeland — closer in some respects to the language Skanderbeg’s soldiers spoke than to modern standard Albanian. Italy recognizes the Arbëreshë as a historic linguistic minority under Law 482/1999.
Many Arbëreshë belong to the Italo-Albanian Catholic Church, a Byzantine-rite community in full communion with Rome. The eparchies of Lungro and Piana degli Albanesi are the church’s two diocesan centers. Their preservation of Albanian liturgy, dress, and oral tradition is a working example of what diaspora cultural retention can look like across six centuries.
The second Italian community is the post-1991 Albanian-citizen population, currently about 440,000–480,000 according to ISTAT (the Italian national statistics agency). These are mostly people who arrived after the 1990–91 collapse, often by boat across the Strait of Otranto. They are concentrated in northern and central Italy — Lombardy, Tuscany, the Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna — and they work across construction, hospitality, manufacturing, and services. By the 2010s, Albanians were the second-largest foreign-citizen community in Italy after Romanians, and they have been one of the most successfully integrated immigrant groups in the country by most measures of language acquisition, school performance, and citizenship uptake.
The two communities — Arbëreshë and post-1991 — interact, but they are distinct. The Arbëreshë are Italian citizens of long standing; the post-1991 community is closer in profile to other recent European migrant communities. Both are part of the global Albanian story, and both are worth holding in mind together.
Greece — the largest single host country
Greece holds, by most estimates, the largest single concentration of Albanians outside Albania, though the numbers are contested and shifting.
After the 1991 collapse, Albanians began crossing the Greek border in large numbers, often on foot through the southern mountains. Estimates of the peak Albanian population in Greece during the 2000s and early 2010s run from 400,000 to over 700,000 — a population swing of unusual size relative to Greece’s roughly 10 million residents. The Greek economic crisis of 2010 onward pushed a significant share back to Albania or onward to other EU countries, but the community remains the largest single national host.
Greek-Albanian relations are layered and not without strain. The community includes Albanian citizens who arrived as labor migrants after 1991, ethnic Greeks from southern Albania (the Northern Epirote community), and the older question of Çamëria — the historically Albanian-populated region in northwestern Greece, whose Muslim Albanian population was expelled at the end of World War II.
We will not adjudicate any of the contested points here. What matters for the diaspora frame: Albanians in Greece form a large, settled population, often bilingual, often with mixed marriages, and increasingly with second-generation children who hold Greek citizenship and identify with both countries. The community is concentrated in Athens, Thessaloniki, and the agricultural plains of central and northern Greece.
Germany, Switzerland, and the postwar EU diaspora
Switzerland and Germany hold the largest Albanian communities in northern Europe, and the story of how they got there starts not in Albania but in Kosovo.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, West Germany and Switzerland recruited Gastarbeiter — guest workers — from across southern Europe and the Balkans. A significant share of those who came from Yugoslavia were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. They worked in construction, manufacturing, and service industries, and they tended to settle rather than rotate home.
After the 1989 abrogation of Kosovo’s autonomy and the 1998–99 war, a second wave of Kosovar Albanians arrived as refugees, joining family already settled. Switzerland’s Albanian community is today estimated at 200,000–300,000, with strong concentrations in Zürich, Bern, and the German-speaking cantons. Germany’s Albanian community, including arrivals from Albania proper and from North Macedonia, runs in the 350,000–500,000 range.
These communities have produced some of the most visible second-generation Albanians in European public life — footballers like Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri (both born in Switzerland to Kosovar Albanian families), business owners, doctors, and political figures. The Swiss and German Albanian communities also send substantial remittances home; remittance inflows are a non-trivial share of Kosovo’s GDP.
The UK community, currently 140,000 or more, is a different shape again — younger, weighted toward the post-1999 Kosovar wave plus a more recent inflow of Albanian-citizen workers and students. London, Birmingham, and Manchester hold the largest concentrations.
The Americas — the United States and beyond
The United States Albanian community is, by formal count, smaller than Italy’s or Greece’s: the 2024 American Community Survey records about 224,000 Albanian Americans (ACS B04006). Community organizations and parish rolls put the real number closer to 750,000–1,000,000 once ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Montenegro and the second- and third-generation US-born are included.
What the US community lacks in headcount it makes up for in institutional depth. Vatra (the Pan-Albanian Federation of America) was founded in Boston in 1912 — seven months before Albania declared independence. The Albanian American National Organization (AANO) was founded in Worcester in 1946. The Albanian American Civic League (AACL) has been the most active diaspora policy voice in Washington since 1989. The top US concentrations are New York (around 56,000), Michigan (27,000), Massachusetts (21,000), New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, and Connecticut.
Canada holds about 36,000 Albanians by the 2021 census, concentrated in the Greater Toronto Area and Montreal. Many are post-1991 or post-1999 arrivals.
Argentina holds a small but historically interesting community. The Albanian Orthodox parish in Buenos Aires was founded in 1928, and an Albanian-Argentine cultural society has operated continuously since the early 20th century. The community is small in headcount today but is a reminder that Albanian migration reached the southern hemisphere a century ago.
Smaller communities exist across Brazil, Mexico, and Chile, mostly from postwar and post-1991 arrivals.
Turkey and the Ottoman-era diaspora
Turkey holds what is, by some estimates, the largest Albanian-descent community of any country outside Albania itself. Numbers vary widely — from 500,000 to as high as 1.3 million — because the Turkish state does not collect ethnicity data and most of the community has been assimilated for generations.
The community has two main historical sources. The first is centuries of Ottoman-era integration: Albanians served as Janissaries, viziers, and provincial administrators across the empire, and many settled in Istanbul, Bursa, and the Anatolian provinces. The second is the 1923 population exchange and the post-1944 migration of Albanian-speaking Muslims from Yugoslav-controlled Kosovo and North Macedonia, who left under state pressure and settled across Turkey through the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s.
Cultural retention varies. In some Turkish-Albanian families, Albanian is still spoken at home and traditional ties to the home village are maintained. In others, only family names and oral history remain. Recent decades have seen a modest cultural revival, including the establishment of Albanian-language radio and cultural associations in Istanbul and several Anatolian cities.
The Turkish-Albanian community is also a reminder that the Albanian diaspora is older than the modern Albanian state. People were leaving the Albanian-speaking lands for the wider Ottoman world centuries before 1912.
What holds the global diaspora together
A diaspora of seven to ten million, spread across two dozen countries, religions, and dialects, would not stay coherent without something holding it together. A short list of what does.
Family. Albanian families are large, geographically extended, and tightly connected. Cousins talk weekly. Weddings pull relatives across continents. The grandmother in Korçë knows what the grandson in the Bronx is doing on Saturday night. This is the most reliable transmission mechanism the diaspora has.
Besa. The Albanian code of honor — a given word, binding to the death, transferable across generations — is the moral backbone of how Albanians treat one another across the diaspora. It is the reason a stranger from a different village or a different religious tradition will be welcomed when they show an Albanian name. The Kanun’s literal hospitality rules have softened, but besa as a frame still shapes how the community holds itself together without a state to enforce its values.
Language. Shqip — the Albanian self-name for the language; shqiptar is the speaker, literally “speaker [of Albanian]” — is the carrier. Tosk and Gheg are mutually intelligible enough that a Massachusetts Tosk-family kid can talk to a Detroit Gheg-family kid without anyone needing a translator. Standardized literary Albanian (finalized in 1972, blending the two) is the version used in schools, newspapers, and broadcast.
Religion, plurally. Albanian Orthodox parishes, Albanian Catholic churches, Albanian Sunni mosques, and Bektashi teqes exist across the diaspora — in the US, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and elsewhere. They function not only as religious institutions but as the social anchors of their local Albanian communities.
Organizations. Vatra (Boston, 1912), AANO, AACL, the regional chambers in the US; the Lega Italo-Albanesi network in Italy; cultural associations across Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and Turkey. These are the formal channels through which the diaspora coordinates.
The press. Dielli — published continuously by Vatra since 1909 — is the oldest Albanian-language newspaper still operating anywhere in the world. Illyria in the Bronx, Albanian-language radio in Switzerland and Germany, and a growing ecosystem of diaspora podcasts and YouTube channels carry the conversation across borders.
What unites the diaspora is not one religion or one dialect or one country of origin. It is the layered combination of family, besa, language, and institutions, applied unevenly but persistently across generations.
The US role in the diaspora
The US Albanian community is, by headcount, smaller than the communities in Italy, Greece, Germany, and Turkey. By most other measures of weight in the global mërgata, it is the heaviest in the room.
A few reasons.
Institutional age. Vatra (1912) predates the modern Albanian state. The Albanian Orthodox Archdiocese in America (1908) is older than most Orthodox jurisdictions in the country. The Pan-Albanian institutional architecture in the US — newspapers, parishes, schools, advocacy groups — has been continuously functional for over a century, which most diaspora communities cannot say.
Financial weight. Remittances from the US Albanian community, plus US-based business and philanthropic investment back into Albania and Kosovo, are a meaningful share of cross-border capital flows. The wealthier US community can move money in ways that a younger labor-migration community cannot.
Policy infrastructure. The Albanian American Civic League (founded by former US Representative Joe DioGuardi in 1989) and the National Albanian American Council (1996, Washington) have given the community a continuous policy voice in the US capital on Balkan questions — particularly Kosovo’s 1999 conflict, recognition in 2008, and ongoing North Macedonia and Çamëria issues. No other diaspora community has comparable Washington access.
The count NAR is building. The 224,000 figure from the 2024 American Community Survey is an undercount, and it always has been, for reasons we have written about at length in Albanian Americans. The National Albanian Registry exists to close that gap with a community-led count — a registry the diaspora itself owns and runs, rather than a federal form that asks the question awkwardly and once. The certificate NAR issues is a recognition document, not a government ID, not citizenship, and not legally binding. It is a way to add yourself to a community count.
The work of the next decade in the global diaspora is mostly the work of holding the community together generationally — keeping the language, the institutions, and the cross-border family ties alive in the third and fourth generations. The US plays the role it has played since 1912: convener, financier, advocate, and counter. The full mërgata is global. The institutions that hold it most reliably are not.
If you are Albanian American, getting counted is the most concrete way to make the US share of the diaspora visible in the global picture. Add yourself to the National Albanian Registry → — it takes about three minutes, it is free, and the data is yours.