Vithkuqi script, also called Büthakukye or Beitha Kukju after the appellation applied to it by German Albanist Johann Georg von Hahn

Johann Georg von Hahn

Johann Georg von Hahn was an Austrian diplomat, philologist and specialist in Albanian history, language and culture....

, was an alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

 invented for writing the Albanian language

Albanian language

Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...

 between 1825 and 1845 by Albanian

Albanians

Albanians are a nation and ethnic group native to Albania and neighbouring countries. They speak the Albanian language. More than half of all Albanians live in Albania and Kosovo...

 scholar Naum Veqilharxhi

Naum Veqilharxhi

Naum Veqilharxhi born Naum Bredhi was an Albanian lawyer and scholar. In 1844, he created a unique alphabet for the Albanian language using characters he had created himself, the Vithkuqi script...

. Though the script is sometimes erroneuosly claimed to be named after its inventor, as in Carl Faulmann's Das Buch der Schrift, the alphabet's name is derived from Vithkuq

Vithkuq

Vithkuq is a municipality in the Korçë District, Korçë County, southeastern Albania. The municipality consists of the villages Vithkuq, Leshnje, Gjanc, Lubonjë, Rehovë, Roshanj, Trebickë, Grabockë, Treskë, Stratobërdh, Panarit, Shtyllë and Cemericë....

, a village in the Korçë

Korçë

Korçë is a city in southeastern Albania and the capital of the Korçë District. It has a population of around 105,000 people , making it the sixth largest city in Albania...

 region where Veqilharxhi was born. Vithkuqi script was specifically designed to be as religiously neutral as possible, avoiding the duplication of Greek, latin, or Arabic characters. It had a near-perfect correspondence between letters and phonemes, but lacked characters for modern Albanian "rr", "xh", and "zh". The script never took hold because of its inventor's premature death and because of the prohibitive costs of cutting new type for the invented characters; nevertheless, a number of documents utilizing the script were published in the late nineteenth century. The script was eventually overwhelmed by the Greek, Arabic and Latin scripts it had been designed to supplant, the latter becoming the official one in 1909.

Other original scripts used for Albanian were the Elbasan script

Elbasan script

The Elbasan script is a mid 18th-century alphabetic script used for the Albanian language. It was named after the city of Elbasan where it was invented...

 and the Todhri script of the 18th century. These scripts similarly failed to see prolonged widespread usage.