What language family does Albanian belong to? Is it Slavic?

Albanian is not a Slavic language, and it is not closely related to Greek, Italian, or Turkish either, even though it borders and has borrowed words from all of them. Albanian is an Indo-European language that forms its own independent branch of the family — it is the only surviving member of that branch, with no close living relatives.

That independent status is why Albanian can feel so unfamiliar at first: unlike, say, Spanish or German, it does not hand English speakers a large stock of recognisable cognates. Over the centuries it absorbed loanwords from Latin, Ancient and modern Greek, Slavic languages, and Turkish, but its core vocabulary and grammar are distinctly its own.

Linguists generally trace it back to the ancient Paleo-Balkan languages, most often to Illyrian, though the exact ancestry is still debated.