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Albanian is the only modern language belonging to the core SAE (Standard Average European) languages which has a morphologically distinct optative. The optative mood in Albanian has two tense forms, Present and Perfect, and at least two domains of a rather regular use. The first one is the so-called performative optative, which is dedicated to the expression of different kinds of blessings, curses, and swearings. Such expressions, often having idiomatic or semi-idiomatic character, are often encountered in the colloquial speech. The second sphere, which is more characteristic of written language, includes conditional and concessive conditional clauses. The data from the Albanian National Corpus show that the optative forms, especially in their performative function, can be found in various types of texts written in the modern Albanian language: prosaic, poetic, religious and, more rarely, journalistic and essayistic texts. In fiction their use is stylistically restricted to the direct speech of the characters and often has an archaising or dialectal shade.