Spoken in: The Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Greece, Serbia, Slovenia, United States (and in the ethnic Macedonian diaspora) (Omniglot) (Ethnologue).

Region: The Balkans.

Total speakers: 2 million (approximately).

Language family: Indo-European, Slavic, South Slavic, Eastern South Slavic, Macedonian.

Official status
Official language in: Republic of Macedonia, Albania.

The Macedonian language (македонски јазик, makedonski jazik) is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia, and is a part of the Eastern group of South Slavic languages. It is also referred to by several alternative names, many formed with the word Slavic. Macedonian is closely related to and mutually intelligible with Standard Bulgarian. It also has some similarities with standard Serbian and the intermediate Torlakian and Shop dialects spoken mostly in southern Serbia and in western Bulgaria (and by speakers in the north and east of Macedonia).

Both Bulgarian Standard and the Macedonian Standard language share typological similarities with Romanian, Greek, and Albanian. These five languages make up the Balkan sprachbund, even though the last three are from different language groups (Romanian is a Romance language, whilst Greek and Albanian each comprise their own separate branches of the Indo-European family). Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Slavic languages not to use noun cases (except for the vocative, and apart from some traces of once living inflections still found scattered throughout the languages). They are also the only Slavic languages with a definite article (Macedonian in fact has three). This last feature is shared with the other languages in the Balkan sprachbund.


Classification and related languages

The Macedonian language belongs to the eastern sub-branch of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The closest relative of Macedonian is Bulgarian, spoken in Bulgaria, parts of the Republic of Macedonia, Greece and Turkey. Bulgarian and Macedonian properly form a dialect continuum and share a set of grammatical features which set them apart from other Slavic languages, with the Bulgarian standard being based on the more eastern dialects, and the Macedonian standard being based on the more western dialects. Macedonian is mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and the Torlakian dialect of the Serbian language, which are spoken as well in parts of Bulgaria and Macedonia. Following that, the next closest languages are also Bosnian and Croatian. Macedonian is also a constituent language of the Balkan Sprachbund, a group of languages which share grammatical and lexical features based on geographical, rather than genetic proximity.


Geographical distribution

The population of the Republic of Macedonia was 2,022,547 in 2002, with 1,344,815 speaking Macedonian as the native language . Outside of the Republic, there are Macedonians living in other parts of the geographical area of Macedonia. There are ethnic Macedonian minorities in neighbouring Albania, in Bulgaria and in Greece. In Bulgaria the number of people professing the Macedonian language in the last census was 3,518 . In Greece, although groups may be considered to be speaking dialects heteronomous with standard Macedonian, they do not all identify their language with their national identity. The Slavic speaking minority in Greece varies on how it describes its language - most describe it as Slavic and proclaim a Greek national identity, although there are smaller groups, some of which describe it as Macedonian and espouse an ethnic Macedonian national identity, and some who describe it as Bulgarian and espouse a Bulgarian national identity. Some prefer to identify as dopii and their dialect as dopia which mean local or indigenous in Greek .

A large number of Macedonians live outside the traditional Macedonian region in the Balkans, with Australia, Canada and the USA having the largest emigrant communities. According to a 1964 estimate, the number of Macedonians living outside of the Republic of Macedonia numbers approximately 580,000 , over 30% of the total population. The Macedonian spoken by communities outside the republic dates back to before the standardisation of the language and retains many dialectic though, overall, mutually intelligible variations.

The Macedonian language has the status of official language only within the Republic of Macedonia. The language is taught in some universities in Albania, Australia, Canada, Croatia, Russia, Serbia, United States and the United Kingdom among other countries.


Dialects

Based on a large group of features, the Macedonian dialects can be divided into Eastern and Western groups (the boundary runs approximately from Skopje and Crna Gora along the rivers Vardar and Crna). In addition, a more detailed classification can be based on the modern reflexes of the Proto-Slavonic reduced vowels ("yers"), vocalic sonorants and the back nasal (o). That classification distinguishes between the following 5 groups:

Western Dialects:

- Ohrid - Prespa Group consisting of the Lower Prespa region, Ohrid, Struga, Radožda, and Vevčani.
- Debar Group consisting of the Drimkol - Golobrdo region, Debar, Mala Reka, Reka, Gora, and Skopska Crna Gora.
- Polog Group consisting of Gostivar (Upper Polog), and Tetovo (Lower Polog), as well as the entire West Central region (Prilep, Kičevo, Bitola, Kruševo, Lerin)
- Kostur - Korča Group consisting of Korçë (Korča), Kastoria (Kostur), and Nestram.

Eastern Dialects:

Eastern Group consisting of the entire eastern part of the Macedonian region including the Kumanovo - Kriva Palanka, Štip - Strumica, Tikveš - Mariovo, Maleševo - Pirin, Lower Vardar (Edessa/Voden, Kilkis/Kukuš, Pella/Postol, Thessaloniki/Solun), and the Serres/Ser - Gotse Delchev/Nevrokop sub regions.

It must be noted that the Ser-Nevrokop group is in fact located mostly outside of the Republic of Macedonia (in Greece and Bulgaria, respectively) and hence its identification as a group of Macedonian dialects is an especially controversial issue. Bulgarian linguists regard both as East Bulgarian dialects, more specifically as part of a Rupski dialect group that stretches through Southern Thrace up to the Black Sea .


Macedonian grammar

As with the Bulgarian grammar, the grammar of Macedonian is markedly analytic in comparison with other Slavic languages, having lost the common Slavic case system. The Macedonian language shows some special and in some cases unique characteristics due to its central position in the Balkans.

Literary Macedonian is the only South Slavic literary language that has three forms of the definite article, based on the degree of proximity to the speaker, and a past tense formed by means of an auxiliary verb "to have", followed by a past passive participle in the neuter.

Both double object and mediative (sometimes referred to as renarrative or admirative) mood are also found in the Bulgarian language, although the use of double object is much more restricted in the Bulgarian standard.

Nouns

Definiteness (article)

The article is postfixed, as in Bulgarian, Albanian and Romanian. One feature that has no parallel in other standard Balkan languages is the existence of three definite articles pertaining to position of the object, unspecified, proximate (or close) and distal (or distant). Bulgarian only has the basic (unspecified) form, although three definite article forms also exist in certain Bulgarian dialects, notably the vernaculars of Tran and parts of the Rhodopes.

Gender and number

Nouns in Macedonian have gender -masculine, feminine and neuter and inflect for number. The gender opposition does not exist in the plural . Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify.

Vocative case

The vocative case is formed by adding the endings -o (usual in feminine nouns), -u (usual in masculine monosyllabic nouns) and -e (usual for masculine polysyllabic nouns). Example: пријател priyatel (friend) > пријателe priyatele (O friend!). Compare with other languages in the Balkan sprachbund: Bulgarian: приятел priyatel - приятелю priyatel'u, Serbo-Croatian: prijatelj/пријатељ - prijatelju/пријатељу, Greek: φίλος fílos - φίλε fíle, Romanian: prieten - prietene. The vocative is used almost only for singular masculine and feminine nouns.

Verbs

Perfect tense

In Macedonian the perfect tense is formed by a clitic which agrees in number and gender with the object of the sentence, followed by има "to have", and the passive participle of the verb in its uninflected form. This is common in Germanic and Romance languages, along with other languages in the Balkan Sprachbund, such as Albanian and Greek. For example, the sentence "I have read the book" reads:

Јаc ја имам прочитано книгата;
Jas ja imam pročitano knigata;
I it (clitic) have read book-the.

In contrast, in other Slavic languages that have the perfect tense, it is almost universally built with the verb "to be" and a past active participle; that is also an option in Macedonian. The older common Slavic form with сум "to be" is predominant in the east of the country, while the form with "to have" is more widespread in the west, but has spread in the younger generations due to the influence of the standard language . The sentence "I have seen" reads:

New perfect Old perfect;
имам видено сум видел;
imam videno sum videl.

Being replaced by the new construction, the "old perfect" tends to become an expression of the renarrative mood (aka nonconfirmative status) in Western Macedonia and in the standard language.

Aorist

The aorist, called in Macedonian either aorist or minato opredeleno svršeno vreme, i.e., past definite complete tense, is a form which refers to a completed action in the past tense. It most often corresponds to the simple past tense in English: I read the book, I wrote the letter, I ate my supper, etc. In contemporary standard Macedonian, the aorist is formed almost exclusively from perfective verbs.

The formation of the aorist for most verbs is not complex, but there are numerous small subcategories which must be learned. While all verbs in the aorist (except sum) take the same endings, there are complexities in the aorist stem vowel and possible consonant alternations.

Future tense

The future tense is formed by means of the clitic ќе and an inflected present tense form of the verb.

In this respect, both Macedonian and Bulgarian differ from other Slavic languages. In Macedonian, as in other Balkan Sprachbund languages (Bulgarian, Greek and Albanian) the clitic is fixed, whereas in Serbo-Croatian it inflects for person and number.

Syntax

The canonical word order of Macedonian is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO).


Vocabulary

As a result of the close relatedness with Bulgarian, Macedonian shares a large percentage of its lexicon with this language. Other languages which have been in positions of power, such as Serbian, Turkish and increasingly English also provide a significant proportion of the loan words. Prestige languages, such as Old Church Slavonic and Russian also provided a lexical source.

During the standardisation process, there was deliberate care taken to try and purify the lexicon of the language. "Serbisms" and "Bulgarisms", which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favour of words from native dialects and archaisms. One example being the word for "event", nastan which was found in certain examples of folk poetry. The Bulgarian and Serbian words that had been in common use were sobitie and događaj respectively. This is not to say that there are no Serbisms or Bulgarisms in the language, but rather they were discouraged on a principle of "seeking native material first" .


Writing system

The Macedonian alphabet, as any Slavic Cyrillic alphabet, is ultimately based on the Cyrillic alphabet of Saints Cyril and Methodius; it is an adaptation of Vuk Karadžić's phonetic alphabet, which is the official alphabet of the Serbian language. It differs from Serbian Cyrillic in the letters Ќ and Ѓ (which have distinct phonetic values from their Serbian counterparts Ћ and Ђ), while Dze (Ѕ, ѕ) is a unique letter preserved from Old Church Slavonic in Macedonian Cyrillic.


History of the Macedonian language

The region of Macedonia and the Republic of Macedonia are located on the Balkan peninsula. The Slavs first came to the Balkan Peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. In the ninth century, the Greek Byzantine monks Saints Cyril and Methodius developed the first writing system for the Slavonic languages. At this time, the Slavic dialects were so close as to make it practical to develop the written language on the dialect of a single region. There is dispute as to the precise region, but it is likely that they were developed in the region around Thessaloniki.

In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Turks invaded and conquered most of the Balkans, incorporating Macedonia into the Ottoman Empire. While the written language, now called Old Church Slavonic, remained static as a result of Turkish domination, the spoken dialects moved further apart. Only very slight traces of written Macedonian survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

During the increase of national consciousness in the Balkans, standards for the languages of Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian were created. As Turkish influence in Macedonia waned, schools were opened up that taught the Bulgarian standard language in areas with significant Bulgarian population.

In 1845 the Russian scholar Viktor Grigorovič travelled in the Balkans in order to study the south Slavic dialects of Macedonia. His work announced to the world for the first time the existence of two separate Bulgarian dialects: Eastern and Western. According to his findings, the Western Bulgarian variety, spoken in Macedonia, was characterized by traces of Old Slavic nasal vowels . It wasn't until the works of Krste Misirkov that parts of what had been regarded as West Bulgarian dialects were defined as a separate 'Macedonian' language. Misirkov was born in a village near Pella in Greek Macedonia. Although literature had been written in the Slavic dialects of Macedonia before, arguably the most important book published in relation to the Macedonian language was Misirkov's On Macedonian Matters, published in 1903. In that book, he argued for the creation of a standard literary Macedonian language from the central dialects of Macedonia which would use a phonetic orthography.

After the first two Balkan wars, the region of Macedonia was split between Greece, Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia occupied the area that is currently the Republic of Macedonia incorporating it into the Kingdom as "Southern Serbia". During this time, Yugoslav Macedonia became known as Vardar Banovina (Vardar province) and the language of public life, education and the church was Serbo-Croatian. In the other two states, Greece and Bulgaria, the respective national languages were imposed, in Bulgaria, the local dialects were described as dialects of Bulgarian.

During the second World War, Yugoslav Macedonia was occupied by the Bulgarians, who were allied with the Axis. The Bulgarian language was reintroduced in schools and liturgies. The Bulgarians were initially welcomed as "liberators" from Serbian domination. However, as a result of unpopular assimilation policies, reminiscent of what Serbian practice had been since the first World War, they were quickly seen as "conquerors".

There were a number of groups fighting the Bulgarian occupying force, some advocating independence and others union with Bulgaria. The eventual outcome was that almost all of Vardar Banovina (i.e. the areas which geographically became known as Vardar Macedonia) was incorporated into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a constituent Socialist Republic with the Macedonian language holding official status within both the Federation and Republic. The Macedonian language was proclaimed the official language of the Republic of Macedonia at the First Session of the Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia, held on August 2, 1944. The first official Macedonian grammar was developed by Krume Kepeski. One of the most important contributors in the standardisation of the Macedonian literary language was Blaže Koneski. The first document written in the literary standard Macedonian language is the first issue of the Nova Makedonia newspaper in 1944. Makedonska Iskra (Macedonian Spark) was the first Macedonian newspaper to be published in Australia, from 1946 to 1957. A monthly with national distribution, it commenced in Perth and later moved to Melbourne and Sydney.


Political views on the Macedonian language

As with the issue of Macedonian ethnicity, the politicians, linguists and common people from Macedonia and neighbouring countries have opposing views about the existence and distinctiveness of the Macedonian language.

According to the Macedonian view, now prevalent and official in the books in Republic of Macedonia, Macedonian was the first official language of the Slavs, thanks to the Saints Cyril and Methodius's introduction of Slavic literacy language through the Glagolitic script, that was based on the Southern Macedonian dialect of Thessaloniki .

Bulgaria recognised the Macedonian language between 1944 and 1948, the date of the Tito-Stalin split . This date also coincided with the first references efforts of Bulgarian linguists to the Serbianisation of the Macedonian language . Although Bulgaria was the first country to recognise the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, it has since refused to recognise the existence of a separate Macedonian nation and a separate Macedonian language. Unlike Bulgaria, since the end of the WWII Serbia ackgnowledges the separate Macedonian nation and its language.

Bulgarian linguists and nationalist commentators regards Macedonian as merely a dialect of its own language. Although described as being dialects of Bulgarian prior to the establishment of the standard, the current academic consensus outside Bulgaria is that Macedonian is an autonomous language within the South Slavic dialect continuum , which is not contested by Serbia.


Macedonian language naming dispute

Bulgarian

In most sources before WWII, the dialects covered by the modern Macedonian language were referred to as Bulgarian dialects. This is based on the fact that until World War II, the southern Slavonic dialect continuum covering the area of today's Republic of Macedonia was referred to as Bulgarian by its speakers and by its non-speakers. After WWII the question about the "Macedonian language" was forgotten in the name of the Bulgaro-Yugoslavian friendship under the pressure of the Soviet Union.

Greece

According to the linguistic publication Ethnologue, alternative names include Macedonian Slavic and (in Greece) Slavic . The use of the name Macedonian for the language is considered offensive by Greeks, who assert that the ancient Macedonian language is the only "Macedonian language" and that it was a northern Greek dialect. Greeks object to the use of the "Macedonian" name in reference to the modern Slavic language, calling it "Slavomacedonian" (Macedonian: славомакедонски јазик, Greek: σλαβομακεδονική γλώσσα), a term introduced and accepted by the Slavic-speaking community of northern Greece itself, or "Skopian", which, since the 1990s, are considered pejorative terms by ethnic Macedonians (i.e. people with that national identity). Terms such as Slav Macedonian have also been used.