Albanian numbers, prices and the old lek problem

A woman at a fruit stall in Tirana holds up a bag and tells you dhjetë mijë. Ten thousand. The handwritten card stuck in the crate says 1,000 lekë. Nobody is cheating you and nobody has made a mistake. Albania revalued its currency in 1965 and a large part of the country never moved over in speech.

This is the single thing that makes Albanian prices harder than Albanian numbers. The numbers themselves are regular and short, and you can learn one to ten in an afternoon. What takes longer is working out whether the figure you just heard is the same figure that is written on the tag, or ten times it.

Everything below is written for an English reader, so the respellings are approximate. Albanian has sounds that English does not: y is the rounded vowel of French tu, q is a soft stop somewhere between the ch of cheese and the t of tune, gj is its voiced partner, and dh is the th of this. The letter ë at the end of a word is a weak schwa and in ordinary speech it often vanishes altogether, so pesë comes out closer to pes.

In 1965 the lek was revalued at ten old lek to one new lek. Every price written since then has been in new lek: the tag in a shop, the receipt, the bank statement, the taxi fare on a meter. In speech, a great many people still quote the old figure, which is ten times larger.

How common this is depends entirely on who is speaking. Market traders and older people use old lek most. Younger speakers in Tirana, supermarket staff and anyone dealing with foreigners tend to use new lek. Plenty of people switch mid-conversation without noticing. There is no rule you can memorise, which is why the written form matters: the tag is always new lek, so if the spoken figure is ten times the printed one, you have just heard old lek.

The other clue is plausibility. An espresso is not ten thousand of anything. If a figure sounds absurd for the object in front of you, drop a zero and see whether it makes sense. And you are allowed to ask outright.

These are the ones you will hear constantly, because almost every price in a market is built out of them plus a word for hundred or thousand.

Three is the one number that changes shape. Albanian nouns have gender, and tre goes with masculine nouns while tri goes with feminine ones. Nothing else in the one to ten range does this, and nobody will misunderstand you if you get it wrong, but you will hear both forms and it is worth knowing they are the same number.

Eleven to nineteen are transparent once you see how they are built. Take the small number, add mbë, which here means on, then dhjetë, ten. Eleven is literally one on ten. They are long words and they are said fast.

The tens are where Albanian does something most European languages do not. Twenty is njëzet and forty is dyzet, and those are counts of twenties rather than counts of tens: one twenty and two twenties. The rest of the tens are built on dhjetë in the ordinary way, so fifty is pesëdhjetë and ninety is nëntëdhjetë. If you only remember one oddity, remember that dyzet is forty and not twenty-something.

To join a ten and a unit you need e, the word for and. It is a single unstressed vowel and it is easy to miss when someone is talking quickly.

Mijë is the word that does the damage in a market, because an old lek quote almost always has one in it. Five hundred lekë on the tag becomes pesë mijë in the air. Once you can hear mijë coming, you have most of the problem solved.

There are two everyday ways to ask. Sa kushton is the neutral one and works anywhere, including a shop with printed prices. Sa bën is shorter and more colloquial, closer to what does that come to, and it is what you will hear people say to each other at a stall or a kiosk.

If you are browsing and do not want a conversation yet, say so before the seller starts weighing things out. This is a normal thing to say and it is not rude.

First, the place matters more than the phrase. Open-air markets, souvenir stalls, antique sellers and taxis without a meter are places where a price can move. Supermarkets, pharmacies, bakeries, bus tickets and restaurants are not. Trying to negotiate in a shop with a printed price reads as an accusation that you are being overcharged, which is a different conversation from the one you wanted.

Second, the gap is usually small. A very low counter-offer tends to end the exchange rather than open it, especially with someone selling produce they grew. The useful opening is not a number at all but a reaction, followed by a question that lets the seller move.

When you have landed on a figure, close it clearly. Albanian sellers will often repeat the agreed number back to you, and that repetition is your last chance to catch an old lek quote before money changes hands.

Cash is still the default outside larger shops and hotels, and small stalls may genuinely have no way to take a card. Ask before you choose the biggest melon.

The word for change is kusur, borrowed from Turkish, and it is what you will hear rather than any textbook alternative. A receipt is faturë.

Do not repeat a price back in a horrified tone when the number is ten times what you expected. Nine times out of ten the seller has quoted old lek, the amount is perfectly ordinary, and you have just reacted to your own arithmetic error in front of them.

Do not lead with a number. Walking up and naming a figure before asking the price skips the part of the exchange that makes it a negotiation rather than a demand. Ask sa kushton, listen, then react.

Do not say shtrenjtë in a shop where the price is printed and fixed. It is not a bargaining move there, it is a complaint about the shop. And do not keep haggling after you have agreed. Once you have said po e marr, the number is settled.

The entire old lek problem is an Albanian problem. Kosovo uses the euro, so a price in Prishtina is said the way it is written, and you will hear things like dy euro e pesëdhjetë with the same little connecting e. North Macedonia uses the denar, Montenegro the euro. If you learn the numbers for Tirana you can use them in all of these places; only the currency and the confusion change.

Pronunciation does shift. Standard Albanian is based on the southern Tosk dialect, while everyday speech in Kosovo, North Macedonia and northern Albania is Gheg. The number words are recognisably the same, but final ë is dropped harder, so pesë sounds like pes and nëntë like nânt, and Gheg has nasal vowels that the standard does not. Nobody will fail to understand your numbers because of this, but the words will sound shorter than you expect.

On the Albanian coast in summer, many businesses quote tourists in euro regardless of what is on the tag. That is a third number in play, so if a figure still does not make sense after you have tried dividing by ten, check which currency you are being quoted in.

Written prices follow the continental convention, so a full stop or a space separates thousands and a comma marks decimals. A tag reading 1.500 lekë is one thousand five hundred, not one and a half. The currency appears as lekë, as L, or as ALL in anything bank-related.

Writing is where the old lek habit mostly disappears. Invoices, contracts, menus, receipts and bank statements are all in new lek, because there is no legal alternative. A seller who quotes you dhjetë mijë out loud will write 1,000 on the slip without feeling that anything has happened. If you want certainty, ask them to write the number down.

On the phone, Albanian numbers are read digit by digit, so a mobile number is a string of single words rather than pairs. Zero is zero. Getting a price over the phone is the worst case for a learner, because you lose the tag, the object and the face, so this is the one situation where it is worth asking for a message instead.

Here is the same set of everyday prices in both forms, so you can see the pattern rather than memorise it.

Learn one to ten, learn mijë, and learn Sa kushton. With those three you can hear a price, spot when it has an extra zero on it, and ask for it again.

Add A bëhet më lirë for the markets and Po e marr for the moment you stop negotiating. Then let the tags do the rest of the teaching: photograph the price cards and the menus around you and the numbers will attach themselves to things you have actually bought.