He was born in
Elbasan and from 1847 studied at the
Zosimea Greek college in
Ioannina, where he became friends with
Johann Georg von Hahn by helping him learn
Albanian and write a German-Albanian
dictionary. In 1856 or 1857 he joined a Protestant church in Izmir after his conversion to Protestantism, thus becoming the first known Albanian Protestant. He went to
Istanbul in 1857, and drafted a
Memorandum for the Albanian language. He stayed in
Malta until 1860 in a
Protestant seminary, finishing the translation of
The New Testament in the
Tosk and
Gheg dialects. He was helped by Nikolla Serreqi from
Shkodër with the
Gheg version of the Testament. Nikolla Serreqi was also the proponent for the use of the Latin alphabet, which had already been used by the early writers of the Albanian literature and Kristoforidhi embraced the idea of a Latin alphabet. He went to
Tunis, where he worked as a teacher until 1865, when a representative of the
British and Foreign Bible Society contracted him to work for the company to produce
Bible translations into Albanian. During the
Great Eastern Crisis, Kristoforidhi criticized some
League of Prizren notables and viewed their actions as being based on self interest, preservation of the sultan's power and "Muslim dominance" instead of the national interest. He viewed the development of the Albanian language as important for the preservation of the Albanian people and devoted much of his lifetime toward studying and recording the language by traveling throughout Albania to collect material. The result of those endeavours was his most important work,
The Dictionary of the Albanian Language () – (), was published in
Athens,
Greece, in 1904, 25 years after it had been drafted by Kristoforidhi and after his death. It was written in Greek. He knew Albanian (Tosk and Gheg dialects), Greek, Latin, Hebrew, English, Italian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Arabic, French and German. == Works ==