Macedonian

## Overview

**Macedonian** is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by around two million people, principally in the Republic of Macedonia and the Macedonian diaspora, with a smaller number of speakers throughout the transnational region of Macedonia. It is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Romania and Serbia.

Standard Macedonian was implemented as the official language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1945 and has since developed a modern literature. Most of the codification was formalized during the same period.

Macedonian dialects form a continuum with Bulgarian dialects; they in turn form a broader continuum with Serbo-Croatian through the transitional Torlakian dialects.

The name of the Macedonian language, as well as is its distinctiveness compared to Bulgarian, are a matter of political controversy in Bulgaria.

## Classification and Related Languages

The modern Macedonian language belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-Europeanlanguage family, together with Bulgarian and the extinct Old Church Slavonic. Macedonian's closest relative is Bulgarian, with which it has a high degree of mutual intelligibility. The next closest relative is Serbo-Croatian. Language contact between Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian reached its height during Yugoslav times, when most Macedonians learned Serbo-Croatian as a compulsory language of education and knew and used Serbian (or "pseudo-Serbian", i.e. a mixture of Serbian and Macedonian).There have been also claims, that Macedonian was intentionally Serbianized first during the process of its standardization.

All South Slavic languages, including Macedonian, form a dialect continuum. Macedonian, along with Bulgarian and Torlakian(transitional varieties of Serbo-Croatian), is also a part of the Balkan sprachbund, a group of languages that share typological, grammatical and lexical features based on geographical convergence, rather than genetic proximity. Its other principal members are Romanian, Greek and Albanian, all of which belong to different genetic branches of the Indo-European family (Romanian is a Romance language, whereas Greek and Albanian comprise separate branches). Macedonian and Bulgarian are sharply divergent from the remaining South Slavic languages, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene, and indeed all other Slavic languages, in that they do not use noun cases (except for the vocative, and apart from some traces of once productive inflections still found scattered throughout the languages) and have lost the infinitive. They are also the only Slavic languages with any definite articles (unlike standard Bulgarian, which uses only one article, standard Macedonian as well as some south-eastern Bulgarian dialects have a set of three based on an external frame of reference: unspecified, proximal and distal definite article). Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Indo-European languages that make use of the narrative mood.

The "*A Dictionary of Three languages*" (1875) written by Georgi Pulevski. It was a conversational phrasebook composed in "question-and-answer" style in three parallel columns; in Macedonian, Albanian, and Turkish; all three spelled in Cyrillic.

Prior to the codification of the standard language (Standard Macedonian), Macedonian dialects were described by linguists as being either dialects of Bulgarian or Serbian. Similarly, Torlakian was also widely regarded as Bulgarian. The boundaries between the South Slavic languages had yet to be "conceptualized in modern terms," and codifiers of Serbian even found it necessary to argue that Bulgarian was not a Serbian dialect as late as 1822. On the other hand, many Macedonian intellectuals maintained that their language "was neither a dialect of Serbian nor of Bulgarian, but a language in its own right". Prior to the standardization of Macedonian, a number of linguists, among them Antoine Meillet, André Vaillant, Mieczysław Małecki, and Samuil Bernstein, also considered Macedonian dialects as comprising an independent language distinct from both Bulgarian and Serbian. Some linguists, including Otto Kronsteiner and Michael Clyne, especially in Bulgaria, still consider Macedonian a variety or dialect of Bulgarian, but this view is politically controversial.

## Political Views on the 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.

In the ninth century AD, saints Cyril and Methodius introduced Old Church Slavonic, the first Slavic language of literacy. Written with their newly invented Glagolitic script, this language was based largely on the dialect of Slavs spoken around Thessaloniki; this dialect is closest to present-day Macedonian and Bulgarian.

Although described as being dialects of Bulgarian or Serbian prior to the establishment of the standard, the current academic consensus (outside of Bulgaria) is that Macedonian is an autonomous language within the South Slavic dialect continuum.

### Bulgarian View

In most sources in and out of Bulgaria before the Second World War, the southern Slavonic dialect continuum covering the area of today's Republic of Macedonia and Northern Greece was referred to as a group of Bulgarian dialects. The local variants of the name of the language were also *balgàrtzki*, *bùgarski* or *bugàrski*; i.e. Bulgarian. Although Bulgaria was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, most of its academics, as well as the general public, regard the language spoken there as a form of Bulgarian. However, after years of diplomatic impasse caused by an academic dispute, in 1999 the government in Sofia solved the problem of the Macedonian language by using the euphemistic formula: "the official language of the country (Republic of Macedonia) in accordance with its constitution".

### Greek View

Greeks were objecting to the use of the "Macedonian" name in reference to the modern Slavic language, calling it "Slavomacedonian" (Greek: σλαβομακεδονική γλώσσα), a term coined by some members of the Slavic-speaking community of northern Greece itself.

In 3 June 2018, the Greek Minister of Shipping and Island Policy Panagiotis Kouroublis, acknowledged that Greece fully recognizes the term "Macedonian language" for the modern Slavic language, since the 1977 UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, a fact confirmed on 6 June by the Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, who stated that the language was recognized by the New Democracy-led government of that time. Kotzias also revealed classified documents confirming the use of the term "Macedonian Language" by the past governments of Greece, as well as pointing out to official statements of the Greek Prime Minister Evangelos Averoff who in 1954 and 1959 used the term "Macedonian language" to refer to the South Slavic language. A week later, on 12 June, the Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, announced that the recognition of the Macedonian language by Greece is reaffirmed in the Prespa agreement.

## Macedonian excerpt from Wikipedia article "Македонски јазик"

Македонската дијалектологија е посебна развиена гранка на македонистиката која се занимава со проучување, истражување, документирање и зачувување на македонските дијалекти. Како стабилна научна дисциплина во македонистиката, дијалектологијата се развила после кодификацијата на македонскиот јазик, но нејзиното присуство се забележува и пред 1940-те години. Дијалектологијата на македонскиот јазик е постара дисциплина и датира уште од првите научни трудови кои се занимавале со македонскиот јазик или од втората половина на XIX век. Како позначајни македонски дијалектолози се забележуваат Ватрослав Јагиќ, Ватрослав Облак, Виктор Григорович, Мјечислав Малецки, Зузана Тополињска, Божидар Видоески и други.

Дијалектите на македонскиот јазик се варијации на стандардниот литературен јазик. Македонскиот јазик брои околу 27 дијалекти поделени во три главни групи. Главната граница помеѓу двата блока источните и западните дијалекти е планината Скопска Црна Гора, продолжува со реката Вардар па сè до Егејското Море (Бело Море). Главна особина за западните дијалекти е побавниот тоналитет на дијалектите, користење на тројниот член и акцентот паѓа на третиот слог од крајот на зборот. Заедничка особина за источните дијалекти е побрзиот тоналитет на зборување, кратење на зборови и променлива позиција на акцентот. Дијалектите се зборуваат на цела територија на Република Македонија, Пиринска Македонија, Егејска Македонија (Беломорска Македонија), Мала Преспа и Голо Брдо и југозападно Косово. Македонскиот јазик, со сите негови дијалекти има над 3 милиони говорници.