What language is spoken in Macedonia?

Greek is by far the most widely spoken and the only official language of public life and education in Macedonia. The local Macedonian dialect is spoken alongside dialects from other parts of Greece and Pontic Greek still spoken by some Greeks of Pontic descent. One archaic Greek dialect indigenous to Greek Macedonia and other parts of Northern Greece is that spoken by the Sarakatsani, a traditionally transhument shepherd community whose dialect has undergone very little change through foreign influences. Macedonian Slavic dialects are the most widely spoken minority language while Aromanian, Arvanitic, Megleno-Romanian, Turkish and Romani are also spoken. Ladino is still spoken by some Jews in Thessaloniki.

Macedonia (Greece)

Macedonia (;, "Makedonía" ) is a geographic and former administrative region of Greece, in the southern Balkans. Macedonia is the largest and Greek region, with a population of 2.38 million in 2017. The region is highly mountainous, with most major urban centres such as Thessaloniki and Kavala being concentrated on its southern coastline. Together with Thrace, and sometimes also Thessaly and Epirus, it is part of Northern Greece. It also contains Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic region of Greece.

Macedonia incorporates most of the territories of ancient Macedon, a kingdom ruled by the Argeads and whose most celebrated members were Alexander the Great and his father Philip II. The name "Macedonia" was later applied to a number of widely-differing administrative areas in the Roman and Byzantine empires, resulting in modern geographical Macedonia. Even prior to the establishment of the modern Greek state in 1830 Macedonia was identified as a Greek province, albeit without clearly defined geographical borders. Modern Macedonia was established in 1913, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Bucharest which ended the Balkan Wars. It continued as an administrative subdivision of Greece until the administrative reform of 1987, when it was divided into the regions of West Macedonia, Central Macedonia, and part of the region of East Macedonia and Thrace, the latter containing also the whole Greek part of the region of Thrace.

The region remains an important economic centre for Greece. Macedonia accounts for the majority of Greece's agricultural production and is also a major contributor to the country's industrial and tourism sectors. Central Macedonia is Greece's tourist region and the most popular region that is not an island. It is home to four UNESCO World Heritage sites, including the ancient Macedonian capital city of Aigai.

Macedonia lies at the crossroads of human development between the Aegean and the Balkans. The earliest signs of human habitation date back to the palaeolithic period, notably with the Petralona cave in which was found the oldest yet known European humanoid, "Archanthropus europaeus petraloniensis". In the Late Neolithic period (c. 4500 to 3500 BC), trade took place with quite distant regions, indicating rapid socio-economic changes. One of the most important innovations was the start of copper working.

According to Herodotus, the history of Macedonia began with the Makednoi tribe, among the first to use the name, migrating to the region from Histiaeotis in the south. There they lived near Thracian tribes such as the Bryges who would later leave Macedonia for Asia Minor and become known as Phrygians. "Macedonia" was named after the Makednoi. Accounts of other toponyms such as Emathia are attested to have been in use before that. Herodotus claims that
a branch of the Macedonians invaded Southern Greece towards the end of the second millennium B.C. Upon reaching the Peloponnese the invaders were renamed Dorians, triggering the accounts of the Dorian invasion. For centuries the Macedonian tribes were organized in independent kingdoms, in what is now Central Macedonia, and their role in internal Hellenic politics was minimal, even before the rise of Athens. The Macedonians claimed to be Dorian Greeks (Argive Greeks) and there were many Ionians in the coastal regions. The rest of the region was inhabited by various Thracian and Illyrian tribes as well as mostly coastal colonies of other Greek states such as Amphipolis, Olynthos, Potidea, Stageira and many others, and to the north another tribe dwelt, called the Paeonians. During the late 6th and early 5th century BC, the region came under Persian rule until the destruction of Xerxes at Plataea. During the Peloponnesian War, Macedonia became the theatre of many military actions by the Peloponnesian League and the Athenians, and saw incursions of Thracians and Illyrians, as attested by Thucidydes. Many Macedonian cities were allied to the Spartans (both the Spartans and the Macedonians were Dorian, while the Athenians were Ionian), but Athens maintained the colony of Amphipolis under her control for many years. The kingdom of Macedon, was reorganised by Philip II and achieved the union of Greek states by forming the League of Corinth. After his assassination, his son Alexander succeeded to the throne of Macedon and carrying the title of Hegemon of League of Corinth started his long campaign towards the east.

Macedonia remained an important and powerful kingdom until the Battle of Pydna (June 22, 168 BC), in which the Roman general Aemilius Paulus defeated King Perseus of Macedon, ending the reign of the Antigonid dynasty over Macedonia. For a brief period a Macedonian republic called the "Koinon of the Macedonians" was established. It was divided into four administrative districts by the Romans in the hope that this would make revolts more difficult, but this manoeuvre failed. Then in 148 BC, Macedonia was fully annexed by the Romans. The northern boundary at that time ended at Lake Ohrid and Bylazora, a Paeonian city near the modern city of Veles. Strabo, writing in the first century AD places the border of Macedonia on that part at Lychnidos, Byzantine Achris and presently Ochrid. Therefore ancient Macedonia did not significantly extend beyond its current borders (in Greece). To the east, Macedonia ended according to Strabo at the river Strymon, although he mentions that other writers placed Macedonia's border with Thrace at the river Nestos, which is also the present geographical boundary between the two administrative districts of Greece.

The Acts of the Apostles () records a vision in which the apostle Paul is said to have seen a'man of Macedonia' pleading with him, saying, "Come over to Macedonia and help us". The passage reports that Paul and his companions responded immediately to the invitation.

Subsequently the provinces of Epirus and Thessaly as well as other regions to the north were incorporated into a new Provincia Macedonia, but in 297 AD under a Diocletianic reform many of these regions were removed and two new provinces were created: Macedonia Prima and Macedonia Salutaris (from 479 to 482 AD Macedonia Secunda). Macedonia Prima coincided approximately with Strabo's definition of Macedonia and with the modern administrative district of Greece and had Thessalonica as its capital, while Macedonia Salutaris had the Paeonian city of Stobi (near Gradsko) as its capital. This subdivision is mentioned in Hierocles' Synecdemon (527–528) and remained through the reign of emperor Justinian.

The Slavic, Avar, Bulgarian and Magyar invasions in the 6–7th centuries devastated both provinces with only parts of Macedonia Prima in the coastal areas and nearer Thrace remaining in Byzantine hands, while most of the hinterland was disputed between the Byzantium and Bulgaria. The Macedonian regions under Byzantine control passed under the tourma of Macedonia to the province of Thrace.

A new system of administration came into place in 789–802 AD, following the Byzantine empire's recovery from these invasions. The new system was based on administrative divisions called Themata. The region of Macedonia Prima (the territory of modern Greek administrative district of Macedonia) was divided between the Thema of Thessalonica and the Thema of Strymon, so that only the region of the area from Nestos eastwards continued to carry the name Macedonia, referred to as the Thema of Macedonia or the Thema of "Macedonia in Thrace". The Thema of Macedonia in Thrace had its capital in Adrianople.

Familiarity with the Slavic element in the area led two brothers from Thessaloniki, Saints Cyril and Methodius, to be chosen to convert the Slavs to Christianity. Following the campaigns of Basil II, all of Macedonia returned to the Byzantine state. Following the Fourth Crusade 1203–1204, a short-lived Crusader realm, the Kingdom of Thessalonica, was established in the region. It was subdued by the co-founder of the Greek Despotate of Epirus, Theodore Komnenos Doukas in 1224, when Greek Macedonia and the city of Thessalonica were at the heart of the short-lived Empire of Thessalonica. Returning to the restored Byzantine Empire shortly thereafter, Greek Macedonia remained in Byzantine hands until the 1340s, when all of Macedonia (except Thessaloniki, and possibly Veria) was conquered by the Serbian ruler Stefan Dušan. Divided between Serbia and Bulgaria after Dušan's death, the region fell quickly to the advancing Ottomans, with Thessaloniki alone holding out until 1387. After a brief Byzantine interval in 1403–1430 (during the last seven years of which the city was handed over to the Venetians), Thessalonica and its immediate surrounding area returned to the Ottomans.

The capture of Thessalonica threw the Greek world into consternation, being regarded as the prelude to the fall of Constantinople itself. The memory of the event has survived through folk traditions containing fact and myths. Apostolos Vacalopoulos records the following Turkish tradition connected with the capture of Thessalonica:

Thessaloniki became a centre of Ottoman administration in the Balkans. While most of Macedonia was ruled by the Ottomans, in Mount Athos the monastic community continued to exist in a state of autonomy. The remainder of the Chalkidiki peninsula also enjoyed an autonomous status: the "Koinon of Mademochoria" was governed by a locally appointed council due to privileges obtained on account of its wealth, coming from the gold and silver mines in the area.

There were several uprisings in Macedonia during Ottoman rule, including an uprising after the Battle of Lepanto that ended in massacres of the Greek population, the uprising in Naousa of the armatolos Zisis Karademos in 1705, a rebellion in the area of Grevena by a Klepht called Ziakas (1730–1810) and the Greek Declaration of Independence in Macedonia by Emmanuel Pappas in 1821, during the Greek War of Independence. In 1854 Theodoros Ziakas, the son of the klepht Ziakas, together with Tsamis Karatasos, who had been among the captains at the siege of Naousa in 1821, led another uprising in Western Macedonia that has been profusely commemorated in Greek folk song.

Greece gained the southern parts of the region with Thessaloniki from the Ottoman Empire after the First Balkan War, and expanded its share in the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria. The boundaries of Greek Macedonia were finalized in the Treaty of Bucharest. In World War I, Macedonia became a battlefield. The Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, favoured entering the war on the side of the Entente, while the Germanophile King Constantine I favoured neutrality. Invited by Venizelos, in autumn 1915, the Allies landed forces in Thessaloniki to aid Serbia in its war against Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, but their intervention came too late to prevent the Serbian collapse. The Macedonian Front was established, with Thessaloniki at its heart, while in summer 1916 the Bulgarians took over Greek eastern Macedonia without opposition. This provoked a military uprising among pro-Venizelist officers in Thessaloniki, resulting in the establishment of a "Provisional Government of National Defence" in the city, headed by Venizelos, which entered the war alongside the Allies. After intense diplomatic negotiations and an armed confrontation in Athens between Entente and royalist forces the King abdicated, and his second son Alexander took his place. Venizelos returned to Athens in June 1917 and Greece, now unified, officially joined the war on the side of the Allies.

In World War II Macedonia was occupied by the Axis (1941–44), with Germany taking western and central Macedonia with Thessaloniki and Bulgaria occupying and annexing eastern Macedonia.

From the 1870s, Slavic speaking communities of northern Greece split into two hostile and opposed groups with two different national identities - Greek and Bulgarian. By the Second World War and following the defeat of Bulgaria, another further split between the Slavic group occurred. Conservatives departed with the occupying Bulgarian Army to Bulgaria. Leftists began identifying as Macedonians (Slavic), joining the communist-dominated rebel Democratic Army of Greece. At the conclusion of the Greek Civil War (1946–49), most Macedonians of Slavic background left Greece and settled in the Yugoslav Socialist Republic of Macedonia. Some also migrated to Canada or Australia.

The name "Macedonia" derives from the Greek Μακεδονία ("Makedonía"), a kingdom (later, region) named after the ancient Macedonians. Their name, Μακεδόνες ("Makedónes"), is cognate to the Ancient Greek adjective μακεδνός ("makednós"), meaning "tall, slim". It was traditionally derived from the Indo-European root "*mak-", meaning 'long' or'slender'. Linguist Robert S. P. Beekes supports the idea that both terms are of Pre-Greek substrate origin and cannot be explained in terms of Indo-European morphology. However, Beekes' views are not mainstream.

Macedonia is divided into three regions () comprising fourteen regional units (). The regional units are further divided into municipalities (Greek: δήμοι) or "communities" (Greek: κοινότητες – roughly equivalent to British or Australian shires). They are overseen by the Ministry for the Interior, while the Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace is responsible for the coordination and application of the government's policies in the region. Prior to the Kallikratis Reform in 2010, Greece's regional units were called "prefectures", and Thasos was part of the prefecture of Kavala.

Macedonia borders the neighboring regions of Thessaly to the south, Thrace (part of the East Macedonia and Thrace region) to the east and Epirus to the west. It also borders Albania to the north-west, the Republic of Macedonia to the north and Bulgaria to the north-east. The three Macedonian regions and their subdivisions are:

The geographical region of Macedonia also includes the male-only autonomous monastic state of Mount Athos, but this is not part of the Macedonia precincts. Mount Athos is under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, and enjoys a special status: it is inaccessible to women; its territory is a self-governed part of Greece, and the powers of the state are exercised through a governor. The European Union takes this special status into consideration, particularly on matters of taxation exemption and rights of installation. The governor of Mount Athos is appointed by the Greek Foreign Ministry.

Macedonia possesses some of the richest farmland in Greece in the plains of Veria, Thessaloniki, Serres and Drama. A wide variety of agricultural products and cash crops are grown, including rice, wheat, beans, olives, cotton, tobacco, fruit, grapes, Florina peppers; there is also production of wine and other alcoholic beverages. Food processing and textile weaving constitute the principal manufacturing industries. Tourism is a major industry along the coast, particularly in the Chalcidice peninsula, the island of Thasos and the northern approaches to Mount Olympus. Many tourists originate from Germany and Eastern Europe.
Thessaloniki is a major port city and industrial center; Kavala is the second harbor of Macedonia. Apart from the principal airport at Thessaloniki (Makedonia Airport), airports also exist in Kavala (M.Alexandros Airport), Kozani (Filippos Airport), and Kastoria (Aristotelis Airport). The "Via Egnatia" motorway crosses the full distance of Macedonia, linking most of its main cities. It also has a train system; it is usually criticized for being underfunded, and there has been much anger directed against OSE, the national railway company.

Central Macedonia is the most popular tourist destination in Greece with more than 3.6 million tourists in 2009 (18% of the total number of tourists who visited Greece that year.)

Popular tourist destinations include the various UNESCO World Heritage sites, the various beaches (such as the peninsula of Chalkidiki) during the summer and ski resorts like Vasilitsa. There is also significant religious tourism to Mount Athos.

Macedonian cuisine is the cuisine of the region of Macedonia in northern Greece. Contemporary Greek Macedonian cooking shares much with general Greek and wider Balkan and Mediterranean cuisine, including dishes from the Ottoman past. Specific influences include dishes of the Pontic, Aromanian, Armenian and Sephardi Jewish population. The mix of the different people inhabiting the region gave the name to the "Macedonian salad".

Music of Macedonia is the music of the geographic region of Macedonia in Greece, which is a part of the music of whole region of Macedonia. Notable element of the local folk music is the use of trumpets and koudounia (called "chálkina" in local idioma).

The inhabitants of Greek Macedonia are overwhelmingly ethnic Greeks and most are Greek Orthodox Christians. In East Macedonia and Thrace there is also a sizable Muslim minority consisting mainly of Pomaks and Western Thrace Turks, although almost all Greek Muslim communities of Western Macedonia such as the Vallahades left the region as part of the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey of 1922–23. Most Pontic Greeks and Caucasus Greeks who came to Greece during or shortly before the 1922–23 population exchange with Turkey were resettled in Greek Macedonia rather than other parts Greece, mainly in towns and villages that had had large Muslim populations until 1922. From the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, the ethnic composition of the region of Macedonia is characterized by uncertainty both about numbers and identification. The 1904 Ottoman census of Hilmi Pasha people were assigned to ethnicity according which church/language they belonged, it recorded 373,227 Greeks in the vilayet of Selânik (Thessaloniki), 261,283 Greeks in the vilayet of Monastir (Bitola) and 13,452 Greeks in the villayet of Kosovo. For the 1904 census of the 648,962 Greeks by church, 307,000 identified as Greek speakers, while about 250,000 as Slavic speakers and 99,000 as Vlach. Hugh Poulton, in his "Who Are the Macedonians", notes that "assessing population figures is problematic" for the territory of Greek Macedonia before its incorporation into the Greek state in 1913. The area's remaining population was principally composed of Ottoman Turks (including non-Turkish Muslims of mainly Bulgarian and Greek Macedonian convert origin) and also a sizeable community of mainly Sephardic Jews (centred in Thessaloniki), and smaller numbers of Romani, Albanians and Vlachs.

During the first half of the twentieth century, major demographic shifts took place, which resulted in the region's population becoming overwhelmingly ethnic Greek. In 1919, after Greek victory in World War I, Bulgaria and Greece signed the Treaty of Neuilly, which called for an exchange of populations between the two countries. According to the treaty, Bulgaria was considered to be the parent state of all ethnic Slavs living in Greece. Most ethnic Greeks from Bulgaria were resettled in Greek Macedonia; most Slavs were resettled in Bulgaria but a number remained, most of them by changing or adapting their surnames and declaring themselves to be Greek so as to be exempt from the exchange. In 1923 Greece and Turkey signed the Treaty of Lausanne in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), and in total 776,000 Greek refugees from Turkey (674,000), Bulgaria (33,000), Russia (61,000), Serbia (5,000), Albania (3,000) were resettled in the region. They replaced between 300,000 and 400,000 Macedonian Turks and other Muslims (of Albanian, Roma, Slavic and Vlach ethnicity) who were sent to Turkey under similar terms.

Macedonian cities during Ottoman rule were often known by multiple names (Greek, Slavic, or Ottoman Turkish by the respective populations). After the partition of Ottoman Europe, most cities in Greece either became officially known by their Greek names or adopted Greek names; likewise most cities in Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia became officially known or adopted names in the languages of their respective states. After the population exchanges, many locations were renamed to the languages of their new occupants.

After the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine ten thousands of Bulgarians left and after the population exchange between Greece and Turkey almost all Muslims left the region, while hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees settled in the region thus changing the demography of the province.

The 1928 Greek Census collected data on the religion as well as on the language.

The population was badly affected by the Second World War through starvation, executions, massacres and deportations. Central Macedonia, including Thessaloniki, was occupied by the Germans, and in the east Nazi-aligned Bulgarian occupation forces persecuted the local Greek population and settled Bulgarian colonists in their occupation zone in eastern Macedonia and western Thrace, deporting all Jews from the region. Total civilian deaths in Macedonia are estimated at over 400,000, including up to 55,000 Greek Jews. Further heavy fighting affected the region during the Greek Civil War which drove many inhabitants of rural Macedonia to emigrate to the towns and cities, or abroad, during the late 1940s and 1950s.

An article published in an Athenian newspaper from 1959 tells a detailed story of the ceremony which took place in the village of Atrapos, when the villagers - mostly women and children - took "the oath before God" to cease speaking the local Slavic idiom, which gives ground for misunderstandings to the Bulgarians.

Greek is by far the most widely spoken and the only official language of public life and education in Macedonia. The local Macedonian dialect is spoken alongside dialects from other parts of Greece and Pontic Greek still spoken by some Greeks of Pontic descent. One archaic Greek dialect indigenous to Greek Macedonia and other parts of Northern Greece is that spoken by the Sarakatsani, a traditionally transhument shepherd community whose dialect has undergone very little change through foreign influences. Macedonian Slavic dialects are the most widely spoken minority language while Aromanian, Arvanitic, Megleno-Romanian, Turkish and Romani are also spoken. Ladino is still spoken by some Jews in Thessaloniki.

Macedonians () is the term by which ethnic Greeks originating from the region are known. Macedonians came to be of particular importance during the Balkan Wars when they were a minority population inside the Ottoman province of Macedonia. The Macedonians now have a strong regional identity, manifested both in Greece and by emigrant groups in the Greek diaspora. This sense of identity has been highlighted in the context of the Macedonian naming dispute after the break-up of Yugoslavia, in which Greece objected to its northern neighbour calling itself the "Republic of Macedonia", since explicit self-identification as "Macedonian" is a matter of heritage for northern Greeks. A characteristic expression of this attitude could be seen when Greek newspapers headlined a declaration by Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis at a meeting of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in January 2007, saying that ""I myself am a Macedonian, and another two and a half million Greeks are Macedonians."

The distinct regional identity of Greek Macedonians is also the product of the fact that it was closer to the centres of power in both the Byzantine and Ottoman period, was considered culturally, politically, and strategically more important than other parts of Greece during these two periods, and also the fact that the region had a far more ethnically and religiously diverse population in both the medieval and Ottoman periods. In the late Byzantine period Greek Macedonia had also been the centre of significant Byzantine successor states, such as the Kingdom of Thessalonica, the short-lived state established by the rival Byzantine emperor, Theodore Komnenos Doukas, and - in parts of western Macedonia - the Despotate of Epirus, all of which helped promote a distinct Greek Macedonian identity.

In the contemporary period this is reinforced by Greek Macedonia's proximity to other states in the southern Balkans, the continuing existence of ethnic and religious minorities in East Macedonia and Thrace not found in southern Greece, and the fact that migrants and refugees from elsewhere in the Balkans, southern Russia, and Georgia (including Pontic Greeks and Caucasus Greeks from northeastern Anatolia and the south Caucasus) have usually gravitated to Greek Macedonia rather than southern Greece.

The exact size of the linguistic and ethnic minority groups of Macedonia is officially unknown, as Greece has not conducted a census on the question of mother tongue since 1951. The main minority groups in Macedonia are:

Slavic-speakers are concentrated in the Florina, Kastoria, Edessa, Giannitsa, Ptolemaida and Naousa regions. Their dialects are linguistically classified variously either as Macedonian or Bulgarian, depending on the region and on political orientation. The exact number of the minority is difficult to know, and its members' choice of ethnic identification is difficult to ascertain (since some people are cautious in the replies that they give when surveys are conducted). The Greek branch of the former International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights has estimated that those of an ethnic Macedonian national consciousness number between 10,000–30,000.

Aromanians form a minority population throughout much of Macedonia. They largely identify as Greeks and most belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. In the 1951 census they numbered 39,855 in all Greece (the number in Macedonia proper is unknown). Many Aromanians villages can be found along the slopes of the Vermion Mountains and Mount Olympus. Smaller numbers can be found in the Prespes region and near the Gramos mountains.

Megleno-Romanians can be found in the Moglena region of Macedonia. The Megleno-Romanian language is traditionally spoken in the 11 Vlach villages, Archangelos, Notia, Karpi, Koupa, Lagkadia, Perikleia, Skra and Kastaneri (the other three are found in the Republic of Macedonia). They are generally adherents to the Orthodox Church while the former majority in Notia was Muslim.

Arvanites communities can be found in Greek Macedonia. Five Arvanite communities exist in Serres regional unit while many can be found in the capital, Thessaloniki. There are three Arvanites villages in the Florina regional unit (Drosopigi, Lechovo and Flampouro) with others located in Kilkis and Thessaloniki regional units.

The Jewish population in Greece was the oldest in mainland Europe, and was mostly Sephardic. Thessaloniki became the largest center of the Sephardic Jews, who nicknamed the city "la madre de Israel" (Israel's mother) and "Jerusalem of the Balkans". It also included the historically significant and ancient Greek-speaking Romaniote community. During the Ottoman era, Thessaloniki's Sephardic community comprised more than half the city's population; the Jews were dominant in commerce until the ethnic Greek population increased after independence in 1912. By the 1680s, about 300 families of Sephardic Jews, followers of Sabbatai Zevi, had converted to Islam, becoming a sect known as the "Dönmeh" (convert), and migrated to Salonika, whose population was majority Jewish. They established an active community that thrived for about 250 years. Many of their descendants later became prominent in trade. Many Jewish inhabitants of Thessaloniki spoke Ladino, the Romance language of the Sephardic Jews.

The Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 burned much of the center of the city and left 50,000 Jews homeless of the total of 72,000 residents who were burned out. Having lost homes and their businesses, many Jews emigrated: to the United States, Palestine, and Paris. They could not wait for the government to create a new urban plan for rebuilding, which was eventually done.

After the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 and the expulsion of Greeks from Turkey, many refugees came to Greece. Nearly 100,000 ethnic Greeks resettled in Thessaloniki, reducing the proportion of Jews in the total community. After this, Jews made up about 20% of the city's population. During the interwar period, Greece granted the Jews the same civil rights as other Greek citizens. In March 1926, Greece re-emphasized that all citizens of Greece enjoyed equal rights, and a considerable proportion of the city's Jews decided to stay.

World War II brought a disaster for the Jewish Greeks, since in 1941 the Germans occupied Greece and began actions against the Jewish population. Greeks of the Resistance and Italian forces (before 1943) tried to protect the Jews and managed to save some. By the 1940s, the great majority of the Jewish Greek community firmly identified as both Greek and Jewish. According to Misha Glenny, such Greek Jews had largely not encountered "anti-Semitism as in its North European form."

In 1943 the Nazis began actions against the Jews in Thessaloniki, forcing them into a ghetto near the railroad lines and beginning deportation to concentration and labor camps. They deported and exterminated approximately 96% of Thessaloniki's Jews of all ages during the Holocaust. Today, a community of around 1200 remains in the city. Communities of descendants of Thessaloniki Jews – both Sephardic and Romaniote – live in other areas, mainly the United States and Israel. Israeli singer Yehuda Poliker recorded a song about the Jews of Thessaloniki, called "Wait for me, Thessaloniki".

Other cities of Greek Macedonia with significant Jewish population (Romaniote or Sephardi) in the past include Veria, Kavala and Kastoria.

Other minority groups include Armenians and Romani. Romani communities are concentrated mainly around the city of Thessaloniki. An uncertain number of them live in Macedonia from the total of about 200,000–300,000 that live scattered on all the regions of Greece.

The question of what language was spoken in ancient Macedonia has been debated by Greek, Macedonian, and other scholars. The discovery of the Pella curse tablet in 1986, found in Pella, the ancient capital of Macedon, has given us a text written in a distinct Doric Greek idiom. Ιt contains a curse or magic spell (Greek: κατάδεσμος, "katadesmos") inscribed on a lead scroll, dated to the first half of the 4th century BC (c. 375–350 BC). It was published in the "Hellenic Dialectology" Journal in 1993. It is one of four texts found until today that might represent a local dialectal form of ancient Greek in Macedonia, all of them identifiable as Doric. These confirm that a Doric Greek dialect was spoken in Macedonia, as was previously expected from the West Greek forms of names found in Macedonia. As a result, the Pella curse tablet has been forwarded as a strong argument that the Ancient Macedonian language was a dialect of North-Western Greek, part of the Doric dialects.

Pella

Pella () is an ancient city located in Central Macedonia, Greece, best known as the historical capital of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon and birthplace of Alexander the Great. On the site of the ancient city is the Archaeological Museum of Pella.

A common folk etymology is traditionally given for the name "Pella", deriving it from the Ancient Greek word "pélla" (), "stone", and it appears in some toponyms in Greece like Pallini (). With the prefix "a-" it forms the Doric "apella", meaning in this case fence, enclosure of stone. The word "apella" originally meant fold, fence for animals, and then assembly of people into the limits of the square. Τhe original meaning was "wooden bowl", and later it meant "stone". R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek proto-form *πελσα

In Antiquity, Pella was a strategic port connected to the Thermaic Gulf by a navigable inlet, but the harbour and gulf have since silted up, leaving the site landlocked.

Pella is first mentioned by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (VII, 123) in relation to Xerxes' campaign and by Thucydides (II, 99,4 and 100,4) in relation to Macedonian expansion and the war against Sitalces, the king of the Thracians.

It was probably built as the capital of the kingdom by Archelaus I, replacing the older palace-city of Aigai although there appears to be some possibility that it may have been created by Amyntas.

Archelaus invited the painter Zeuxis, the greatest painter of the time, to decorate his palace. He also later hosted the poet Timotheus of Miletus and the Athenian playwright Euripides who finished his days there writing and producing "Archelaus". Euripides "Bacchae" was first staged here, about 408 BC. According to Xenophon, in the beginning of the 4th century BC Pella was the largest Macedonian city. It was the birthplace and seats of Philip II, in 382 BC and of Alexander the Great, his son, in 356 BC.

It became the largest and richest city in Macedonia and flourished particularly under Cassander's rule. The reign of Antigonus most likely represented the height of the city's prosperity, as this is the period which has left us most archaeological remains. The famous poet Aratus died in Pella c. 240 BC.

Pella is further mentioned by Polybius and Livy as the capital of Philip V and of Perseus during the Macedonian Wars fought against the Roman Republic.

In 168 BC, it was sacked by the Romans, and its treasury transported to Rome, and Livy reported how the city looked in 167 BC to Lucius Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus, the Roman who defeated Perseus at the battle of Pydna:

Pella was declared capital of the 3rd administrative division of the Roman province of Macedonia, and was possibly the seat of the Roman governor. Activity continued to be vigorous until the early 1st century BC and, crossed by the Via Egnatia, Pella remained a significant point on the route between Dyrrachium and Thessalonika.

In about 90 BC the city was destroyed by an earthquake; shops and workshops dating from the catastrophe have been found with remains of their merchandise, though the city was eventually rebuilt over its ruins. Cicero stayed there in 58 BC, though by then the provincial seat had already transferred to Thessalonika.

Pella was promoted to a Roman Colony sometime between 45 and 30 BC and its currency was marked "Colonia Iulia Augusta Pella". Augustus settled peasants there whose land he had usurped to give to his veterans (Dio Cassius LI, 4). But, unlike other Macedonian colonies such as Philippi, Dion, and Cassandreia, it never came under the jurisdiction of "ius Italicum" or Roman law. Four pairs of colonial magistrates ("duumvirs quinquennales") are known for this period.

The decline of the city was rapid, in spite of being a "Colonia": Dio Chrysostom ("Or." 33.27) and Lucian both attest to the ruin of the ancient capital of Philip II and Alexander, though their accounts may be exaggerated. In fact, the Roman city was somewhat to the west of and distinct from the original capital, which explains some contradictions between coinage, epigraphs, and testimonial accounts. Despite its decline, archaeology has shown that the southern part of the city near the lagoon continued to be occupied until the 4th century.

(This is not to be confused with Pella, Jordan to which ancient sources report Christians fled from Jerusalem in 66 AD.).

In about 180 AD, Lucian of Samosata could describe it in passing as "now insignificant, with very few inhabitants". It later bore the name Diocletianopolis (Διοκλητιανούπολις - "Diokletianoupolis").

In the Byzantine period, the Roman site was occupied by a fortified village.

Excavations there by the Greek Archaeological Service begun in 1957 revealed large, well-built houses with colonnaded courts and rooms with mosaic floors portraying such scenes as a lion hunt and Dionysus riding a panther. In modern times it finds itself as the starting point of the Alexander The Great Marathon, in honour of the city's ancient heritage.

The site was explored by 19th-century voyagers including Holand, Pouqueville, Beaujour, Cousinéry, Delacoulonche, Hahn, Glotz and Struck, based on the descriptions provided by Titus Livius. The first excavation was begun by G. Oikonomos in 1914–15. The modern systematic exploration of the site began in 1953 and work has continued since then uncovering significant parts of the extensive city.

In February 2006, a farmer accidentally uncovered the largest tomb ever found in Greece. The names of the noble ancient Macedonian family are still on inscriptions and painted sculptures and walls have survived. The tomb dates to the 2nd or 3rd century BC.
Overall, archaeologists have uncovered 1,000 tombs since the year 2000, but these only represent an estimated 5% of the site. In 2009 43 graves containing rich and elaborate grave goods were found and in 2010 37 tombs dating from 650 to 280 BC were discovered containing rich ancient Macedonian artifacts ranging from ceramics to precious metals. One of the tombs was the final resting place of a warrior from the 6th century BC with a bronze helmet with a gold mouthplate, weapons and jewellery.

Many artefacts are displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Pella.

The city proper was located south of and below the palace. Designed on a grid plan as envisaged by Hippodamus, it consists of parallel streets which intersect at right angles and form a grid of eight rows of rectangular blocks. The blocks are of a consistent width — each approximately 45 m — and of a length which varies from 111 m to 152 m, 125 metres being the most common. The streets are from 9 to 10 metres wide, except for the middle East–West arterial, which is up to 15 metres wide. This street is the primary access to the central public agora, which occupied a space of ten blocks. Two North-South streets are also a bit wider than the rest, and serve to connect the city to the port further South. This type of plan dates to the first half of the 4th century BC, and is very close to the ideal in design, though it distinguishes itself by large block size; Olynthus in Chalcidice for example had blocks of 86.3×35 metres. On the other hand, later Hellenistic urban foundations have blocks comparable to those of Pella: 112×58 m in "Laodicea ad Mare", or 120×46 m in Aleppo.

The city is built on the former island of Phacos, a promontory which dominated the sea to the south in the Hellenistic period. The city wall mentioned by Livy is only partly known. It consists of a rampart of crude bricks (about 50 cm square) raised on a stone foundation; some of which has been located North of the palace, and some in the South next to the lake. Inside the ramparts, three hills occupy the North.

In pride of place in the centre of the city is the Agora, built in the last quarter of the 4th century BC and an architectural gem, unique in conception and size; it covered approx. 7 hectares or 10 city blocks. Pella is one of the first known cities to have had an extensive piped water supply to individual house and waste water disposal from most of the city.

The agora was surrounded by the shaded colonnades of stoae, and streets of enclosed houses with frescoed walls round inner courtyards. The first "trompe-l'oeil" wall murals imitating perspective views ever seen were on walls at Pella. There were temples to Aphrodite, Cybele and Demeter. Pella's pebble-mosaic floors are famous: some reproduce Greek paintings; one shows a lion-griffin attacking a stag, a familiar motif also of Scythian art, another depicts Dionysus riding a leopard. These mosaics adorned the floors of rich houses, often named after their representations,
particularly the Houses of Helen and Dionysus.

The palace is situated on a place of honour on the central hill. Partly excavated, it occupied a considerable area of perhaps 60,000 square metres. The plan is still not well known, but has been related to that of the city plan (see diagram). The Pella palace consisted of several — possibly seven — large architectural groupings juxtaposed in two rows, each including a series of rooms arranged around a central square courtyard, generally with porticos. Archaeologists have thus far identified a palaestra and baths. The south facade of the palace, towards the city, consisted of one large (at least 153 metres long) portico, constructed on a two metres high foundation. The relationship between the four principal complexes is defined by an interruption in the portico occupied by a triple propylaeum, 15 m high, which gave the palace an imposing monumental air when seen from the city below.

Dating of the palace has posed some problems: the large buildings could date to the reign of Philip II, but other buildings appear to be earlier. The baths date from the reign of Cassander.

The size of the complex indicates that, unlike the palace at Vergina, this was not only a royal residence or a grandiose monument but also a place of government which was required to accommodate a significant portion of the administrative apparatus of the kingdom.

Macedonian (, "makedonski jazik") is a South Slavic language, spoken as a first language by approximately 1.4-2.5 million people principally in Macedonia and the Macedonian diaspora. It is the official language in Macedonia and a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Romania and Serbia.

Languages of the Republic of Macedonia

The main two languages of the Republic of Macedonia are Macedonian and Albanian. Apart from Macedonian and Albanian, Macedonia officially recognizes five national minority languages: Turkish, Romani, Serbian, Bosnian, and Aromanian. The Macedonian Sign Language is the country's official sign language.

According to the last 2002 census, Macedonia had a population of 2.022,547 citizens. 1,344,815 Macedonian citizens declared that they speak Macedonian, 507,989 citizens speak Albanian, 71,757 citizens speak Turkish, 38,528 citizens speak Romani, 24,773 citizens speak Serbian, 8.560 citizens speak Bosnian, 6,884 citizens speak Aromanian and 19,241 citizens speak other languages.

The language policy in Macedonia is regulated by the 7 Article of the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia and the Law of languages. According to the national constitution:

The Albanian language is co-official at a state level (excluding defense, central police and monetary policy) and in local self-government units where speakers are 20% or more. These include places such as Tetovo, Brvenica, Vrapčište and other municipalities.

The change in status occurred in 2019 as usage of the Albanian language became no longer geographically limited. The new law extended the official use of Albanian over the entire country, easing communication in Albanian with the institutions. Under the new legislation, Macedonian continues to be the primary official language, while Albanian may be used now as a second one, including at a national level in official matters. The legislation stipulates also all public institutions in the country will provide Albanian translations in their everyday work. Despite since 2019 the usage of Albanian language being no longer geographically limited, the Macedonian language with the Cyrillic alphabet remains the only official language throughout the whole territory of the Republic of Macedonia and its international relations, per Macedonian Government.

Some minority languages are co-official, along with Macedonian, in the municipalities ("opštini") where they are spoken by at least 20% of the municipal population. Turkish is co-official in Centar Župa and Plasnica. Romani in Šuto Orizari and Aromanian in Kruševo, even though it is spoken by ~10% of the municipal population. Serbian is also co-official in Čučer-Sandevo. Bosnian is the only recognized minority language that is not official on municipal level.

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

Albanian () is an Indo-European language spoken by over 7.3 million people world-wide, 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 Greece. Albanian is also spoken in centuries-old Albanian-based dialect speaking communities scattered in southern Greece, southern Italy, Sicily, Ukraine and the Albanian diaspora. Within Macedonia, Albanian is spoken in Western parts of the Republic.

Turkish ("Türkçe") is the most populous of the Turkic languages, with over 70 million native speakers. Speakers are located predominantly in Turkey, with smaller groups in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus, Greece, and other parts of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia. Small Turkish-speaking communities can be found in several places in Macedonia, such as Vrapčište, Skopje and Gostivar.

Balkan Romani () is one of several related languages of the Romani people, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Many varieties of Romani are divergent and sometimes considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romani (about 900,000 speakers), Balkan Romani (700,000), Carpathian Romani (500,000) and Sinti Romani (300,000). In Macedonia Balkan Romani is spoken. Šuto Orizari is the largest Romani-speaking settlement in the country.

Serbian (српски, "srpski") is a standardized register of the Serbo-Croatian language spoken by Serbs, mainly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Macedonia. It is official in Serbia and one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is the principal language of the Serbs. Serbian is mainly spoken in the municipalities of Čučer Sandevo (~20% of the population) and Staro Nagoričane (19%).

Bosnian ("bosanski", босански) is another standardized register of Serbo-Croatian, spoken by Bosniaks. As a standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect, it is one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most of the Bosnian-speaking Macedonian citizens live in Skopje and the Municipality of Veles.

Aromanian ("Limba Armãneascã") or "Vlach" is an Eastern Romance language spoken in several pockets across Southeastern Europe. Its speakers are called Aromanians or "Vlachs" (which is an exonym in widespread use to define the communities in the Balkans). It shares many features with modern Romanian, having similar morphology and syntax, as well as a large common vocabulary inherited from Latin. An important source of dissimilarity between Romanian and Aromanian is the adstratum languages: while Romanian has been influenced to a greater extent by the Slavic languages, Aromanian has been more influenced by the Greek language, with which it has been in close contact throughout its history. The largest Aromanian-speaking community in Macedonia can be found in the town of Kruševo (~10% of the municipal population). In Macedonia, the language is known as 'Vlach' (влашки јазик, "vlaški jazik").

The Macedonian sign language ( or / ) is a sign language of the deaf community in Macedonia. As all sign languages, the Macedonian sign language is also based on gestures and body movements, particularly movements with the hands. The precise number of signers in Macedonia is not known, but 6,000 people request signed news on Macedonian television. The learning and the usage of the language, as well as the rights of the deaf community in Macedonia are regulated by a national law.

Many people speak a foreign language. Most of the older population has knowledge of Serbo-Croatian, French or German. Russian is also well-known. Among the younger population, English is extremely common, along with knowledge of Serbo-Croatian and some German.

Languages of the Republic of Macedonia

Languages of the Republic of Macedonia

Macedonian (;, "makedonski", ) 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.

Macedonian language

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.

The modern Macedonian language belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-European language 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.

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:

According to Olga Mišeska–Tomić:

Modern questions of classification are largely shaped by political and social factors. Structurally, Macedonian, Bulgarian and southeastern forms of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian) form a dialectical continuum that is a legacy of the linguistic developments during the height of the Preslav and Ohrid literary schools.

Although it has been claimed that Standard Macedonian was codified on the base of those dialects (i.e. the Prilep-Bitola dialect) most unlike Bulgarian, this interpretation stems from the works of Krste Misirkov, who suggested that Standard Macedonian should abstract on those dialects "most distinct from the standards of the other Slavonic languages". Likewise, this view does not take into account the fact that a Macedonian koiné language was already in existence. The codifiers ultimately chose the same dialects, but did so because they were "most widespread and most likely to be adopted by speakers of other dialects."

The population of the Republic of Macedonia was 2,022,547 in 2002, with 1,644,815 speaking Macedonian as their native language. Outside 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, in Greece, and in Serbia. According to the official Albanian census of 1989, 4,697 ethnic Macedonians reside in Albania.

A large number of Macedonians live outside the traditional Balkan Macedonian region, with Australia, Canada, and the United States having the largest emigrant communities. According to a 1964 estimate, approximately 580,000 Macedonians live outside the Macedonian Republic, nearly 30% of the total population. The Macedonian language has the status of official language only in the Republic of Macedonia, and is a recognized minority and official language in parts of Albania (Pustec), Romania, and Serbia (Jabuka and Plandište). There are provisions for learning the Macedonian language in Romania as Macedonians are an officially recognized minority group. Macedonian is taught in some universities in Australia, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries.

The varieties spoken by the Slavophone minority in parts of northern Greece, especially those in the Greek provinces of West and Central Macedonia, are today usually classified as part of the Macedonian language, with those in East Macedonia being transitional towards Bulgarian. Bulgarian linguistics traditionally regards them all as part of the Bulgarian language together with the rest of Macedonian. However, the codification of standard Macedonian has been in effect only in the Republic of Macedonia, and the Slavonic dialects spoken in Greece are thus practically "roofless", with their speakers having little access to standard or written Macedonian.

Most of the language speakers in Greece do not identify ethnically as "Macedonians", but as ethnic Greeks ("Slavophone Greeks") or "dopii" (locals). Therefore, the simple term "Macedonian" as a name for the Slavic language is often avoided in the Greek context, and vehemently rejected by most Greeks, for whom "Macedonian" has very different connotations. Instead, the language is often called simply "Slavic" or "Slavomacedonian", with "Macedonian Slavic" often being used in English. Speakers themselves variously refer to their language as "makedonski", "makedoniski" ("Macedonian"), "slaviká" (, "Slavic"), "dópia" or "entópia" (, "local/indigenous [language]"), "balgàrtzki" in some parts of the region of Kastoria, "bògartski" ("Bulgarian") in some parts of Dolna Prespa along with "naši" ("our own") and "stariski" ("old"). In Kastoria, however, the name "Macedonian" is used as well by the local people.

The exact number of speakers in Greece is difficult to ascertain, with estimates ranging between 20,000 and 250,000. Jacques Bacid estimates in his 1983 book that "over 200,000 Macedonian speakers remained in Greece". Other sources put the numbers of speakers at 180,000 220,000 and 250,000, whereas Yugoslav sources vary, some putting the estimated number of "Macedonians in Greek Macedonia" at 150,000–200,000 and others at 300,000. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" and the Reader's Digest World Guide both put the figure of ethnic Macedonians in Greece at 1.8% or c.200,000 people, with the native language roughly corresponding with the figures. The UCLA also states that there are 200,000 Macedonian speakers in Greece. A 2008 article in the Greek newspaper "Eleftherotypia" put the estimate at 20,000.

The largest group of speakers are concentrated in the Florina, Kastoria, Edessa, Giannitsa, Ptolemaida and Naousa regions. During the Greek Civil War, the codified Macedonian language was taught in 87 schools with 10,000 students in areas of northern Greece under the control of Communist-led forces, until their defeat by the National Army in 1949. In recent years, there have been attempts to have the language recognized as a minority language.

The historical and linguistic relationships between the Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are special and complicated. Macedonian researchers claim Macedonian is spoken in southwestern Bulgaria, whereas Bulgarian and Greek linguists argue Macedonian is a variety of Bulgarian.

The rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire began to degrade its specific social system, and especially the so-called Rum millet, through constant identification of the religious creed with ethnicity. The national awakening of each ethnic group was complex and most of the groups interacted with each other.

During the Bulgarian national revival, which occurred in the first half of the 19th century, the Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs under the supremacy of the Greek Orthodox clergy wanted to create their own Church and schools which would use a common modern "Macedono-Bulgarian" literary standard, called simply "Bulgarian". The national elites active in this movement used mainly ethnolinguistic principles to differentiation between "Slavic-Bulgarian" and "Greek" groups. At that time, every ethnographic subgroup in the Macedonian-Bulgarian linguistic area wrote in their own local dialect and choosing a "base dialect" for the new standard was not an issue. Subsequently, during the 1850s and 1860s a long discussion was held in the Bulgarian periodicals about the need for a dialectal group (eastern, western or compromise) upon which to base the new standard and which dialect that should be. During the 1870s this issue became contentious, and sparked fierce debates.

In 1878, a distinct Bulgarian state was established. The new state did not include the region of Macedonia which remained outside its borders in the frame of the Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, the idea of a common compromise standard was rejected by the Bulgarian codifiers during the 1880s and the eastern Bulgarian dialects were chosen as a basis for standard Bulgarian. Macedono-Bulgarian writers and organizations who continued to seek greater representation of Macedonian dialects in the Bulgarian standard were deemed separatists. One example is the Young Macedonian Literary Association, which the Bulgarian government outlawed in 1892. Though standard Bulgarian was taught in the local schools in Macedonia till 1913, the fact of political separation became crucial for the development of a separate Macedonian language.

With the advent of Macedonian nationalism, the idea of linguistic separatism emerged in the late 19th century, and the need for a separate Macedonian standard language subsequently appeared in the early 20th century. In the Interwar period, the territory of today's Republic of Macedonia became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Bulgarian was banned for use and the local vernacular fell under heavy influence from the official Serbo-Croatian language. However, the political and paramilitary organizations of the Macedonian Slavs in Europe and the Americas, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and the Macedonian Patriotic Organization (MPO), and even their left-wing offsets, the IMRO (United) and the Macedonian-American People's League continued to use literary Bulgarian in their writings and propaganda in the interbellum. During the World wars Bulgaria's short annexations over Macedonia saw two attempts to bring the Macedonian dialects back towards Bulgarian. This political situation stimulated the necessity of a separate Macedonian language and led gradually to its codification after the Second World War. It followed the establishment of SR Macedonia, as part of Communist Yugoslavia and finalized the
progressive split in the common Macedonian–Bulgarian language.

During the first half of the 20th century the national identity of the Macedonian Slavs shifted from predominantly Bulgarian to ethnic Macedonian and their regional identity had become their national one. Although, there was no clear separating line between these two languages on level of dialect then, the Macedonian standard was based on its westernmost dialects. Afterwards, Macedonian became the official language in the new republic, Serbo-Croatian was adopted as a second official language, and Bulgarian was proscribed. Moreover, in 1946–1948 the newly standardized Macedonian language was introduced as a second language even in Southwestern Bulgaria. Subsequently, the sharp and continuous deterioration of the political relationships between the two countries, the influence of both standard languages during the time, but also the strong Serbo-Croatian linguistic influence in Yugoslav era, led to a horizontal cross-border dialectal divergence. Although some researchers have described the standard Macedonian and Bulgarian languages as varieties of a pluricentric language, they in fact have separate dialectal bases; the Prilep-Bitola dialect and Central Balkan dialect, respectively. The prevailing academic consensus (outside of Bulgaria and Greece) is that Macedonian and Bulgarian are two autonomous languages within the eastern subbranch of the South Slavic languages. Macedonian is thus an "ausbau language"; i.e. it is delimited from Bulgarian as these two standard languages have separate dialectal bases.

The total number of Macedonian speakers is highly disputed. Although the precise number of speakers is unknown, figures of between 1.6 million (from Ethnologue) and 2–2.5 million have been cited; see and. The general academic consensus is that there are approximately 2 million speakers of the Macedonian language, accepting that "it is difficult to determine the total number of speakers of Macedonian due to the official policies of the neighbouring Balkan states and the fluid nature of emigration". According to the censuses and figures, the number of speakers of Macedonian is:

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

Western Dialects:

Eastern Dialects:

The Ser-Drama-Lagadin-Nevrokop dialect and Maleševo-Pirin dialect are also considered Bulgarian dialects.

This discusses the phonological system of Standard Macedonian (unless otherwise noted) based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect. For discussion of other dialects, see Macedonian dialects. Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.

Schwa
The schwa is phonemic in many dialects (varying in closeness to or ) but its use in the standard language is marginal. When writing a dialectal word and keeping the schwa for aesthetic effect, an apostrophe is used; for example,,, etc. When spelling aloud, each consonant is followed by the schwa. The individual letters of acronyms are pronounced with the schwa in the same way: (). The lexicalized acronyms () and () (a brand of cigarettes), are among the few exceptions.

Vowel length
Vowel length is not phonemic. Vowels in stressed open syllables in disyllablic words with stress on the penult can be realized as long, e.g. 'Veles'. The sequence is often realized phonetically as ; e.g. "'colloq." hour'.

The alveolar trill () is syllabic between two consonants; for example, 'finger'. The dental nasal () and dental lateral () are also syllabic in certain foreign words; e.g. 'newton', 'Popocatépetl', etc.

The labiodental nasal occurs as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'tram'). The velar nasal similarly occur as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'English'). The latter realization is avoided by some speakers who strive for a clear, formal pronunciation.

At morpheme boundaries (represented in spelling) and at the end of a word (not represented in spelling), voicing opposition is neutralized.

The word stress in Macedonian is, meaning it falls on the third from last syllable in words with three or more syllables, and on the first or only syllable in other words. This is sometimes disregarded when the word has entered the language more recently or from a foreign source. The following rules apply:

For example, 'child','mother' and 'father'.

For example,'mountain', 'the mountain' and 'the mountaineers'.

Exceptions include:

Macedonian grammar 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 perfect tense formed by means of an auxiliary verb "to have", followed by a past participle in the neuter, also known as the verbal adjective.

Macedonian nouns (именки, "imenki") belong to one of three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and are inflected for number (singular and plural), and marginally for case. The gender opposition is not distinctively marked in the plural. The Macedonian nominal system distinguishes two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), case and definiteness. Definiteness is expressed by three definite articles pertaining to the position of the object (unspecified, proximate, and distal), which are suffixed to the noun.

Macedonian has a complex system of verbs. Generally speaking Macedonian verbs have the following characteristics, or categories as they are called in Macedonistics: tense, mood, person, type, transitiveness, voice, gender and number.

According to the categorization, all Macedonian verbs are divided into three major groups: a-group, e-group and i-group. Furthermore, the i-subgroup is divided into three more subgroups: a-, e- and i-subgroups. This division is done according to the ending (or the last vowel) of the verb in the simple present, singular, third person. Regarding the form, the verb forms can be either simple or complex.

The Macedonian simple verb forms are:

The Macedonian complex verb forms are:
Prepositions (предлози, "predlozi") are part of the closed word class that are used to express the relationship between the words in a sentence. Because Macedonian lost its case system, the prepositions are very important for creation and expression of various grammatical categories. The most important Macedonian preposition is 'na' ('of', 'on', 'to'). Regarding the form, the prepositions can either be "simple" or "complex". Based on the meaning the preposition express, they can be divided into prepositions of "time, place, manner" and "quantity".

As a result of the close relationship with Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian shares a considerable amount of its lexicon with these languages. Other languages that have been in positions of power, such as Ottoman Turkish and, increasingly, English have also provided a significant proportion of the loanwords. Prestige languages, such as Old Church Slavonic—which occupies a relationship to modern Macedonian comparable to the relationship of medieval Latin to modern Romance languages—and Russian also provided a source for lexical items.

During the standardization process, there was deliberate care taken to try to purify the lexicon of the language. Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms, which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favor of words from native dialects and archaisms. One example was the word for "event", "настан", which was found in certain examples of folk poetry collected by the Miladinov Brothers in the 19th century, whereas the Macedonian writer Krste Misirkov had previously used the word "собитие", a Russian loanword ("событие"). This is not to say that there are no Serbianisms, Bulgarianisms or even Russianisms in the language, but rather that they were discouraged on a principle of "seeking native material first".

The language of the writers at the turn of the 19th century abounded with Russian and, more specifically, Old Church Slavonic lexical and morphological elements that in the contemporary norm are substituted with native words or calqued using productive morphemes. Thus, the now slightly archaicized forms with suffixes –"ние" and –"тел", adjectives with the suffixes –"телен" and others, are now constructed following patterns more typical of Macedonian morphology. For example, "дејствие" (Russ. "действие") corresponds to "дејство" 'action', "лицемерие" (Russ. "лицемерие") → "лицемерство" 'hypocrisy', "развитие" (Russ. "развитие") → "развиток" 'development', "определение" (Russ. "определение") → "определба" 'determination, orientation', "движение" (Russ. "движение") → "движење"'movement', "продолжител" (Russ. "продолжитель") → "продолжувач" 'extender, continuator', "победител" (Russ. "победитель") → "победник" 'winner, victor', "убедителен" (Russ. "убедительный") → "убедлив" 'convincing, persuasive', etc. Many of these words are now obsolete or archaic (as with "развитие"), synonymous ("лицемерие" and "лицемерство") or have taken on a slightly different nuance in meaning ("дејствие"'military act' vs. "дејство" 'act, action' in a general sense).

The use of Ottoman Turkish loanwords is discouraged in the formal register when a native equivalent exists (e.g. "комшија" (← Turk. "komşu") vs. "сосед" (← PSl. *sǫsědъ) 'neighbor'), and these words are typically restricted to the archaic, colloquial, and ironic registers.

New words were coined according to internal logic and others calqued from related languages (especially Serbo-Croatian) to replace those taken from Russian, which include "известие" (Russ. "известие") → "извештај"'report', "количество" (Russ. "количество") → "количина" 'amount, quantity', "согласие" (Russ. "согласие") → "слога" 'concord, agreement', etc. This change was aimed at bringing written Macedonian closer to the spoken language, effectively distancing it from the Bulgarian language with its numerous Russian loans, and represents a successful puristic attempt to abolish a lexicogenic tradition once common in written literature.

The modern Macedonian alphabet was developed by linguists in the period after the Second World War, who based their alphabet on the phonetic alphabet of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, though a similar writing system was used by Krste Misirkov in the early 20th century. The Macedonian language had previously been written using the Early Cyrillic alphabet, or later using the Cyrillic script with local adaptations from either the Serbian or Bulgarian alphabets.

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian alphabet, along with the IPA value for each letter:

Macedonian orthography is consistent and phonemic in practice, an approximation of the principle of one grapheme per phoneme. A principle represented by Adelung's saying, "write as you speak and read as it is written" ("пишувај како што зборуваш и читај како што е напишано"). However, there are occasional inconsistencies or exceptions.

The Lord's Prayer

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 AD. In the ninth century, the Byzantine Greek 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. The Ohrid Literary School was established in Ohrid in 886 by Saint Clement of Ohrid on orders of Boris I of Bulgaria. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Turks invaded and conquered most of the Balkans, incorporating Macedonia into the Ottoman Empire. Although the written language, now called Old Church Slavonic, remained static as a result of Turkish domination, the spoken dialects moved further apart.

The earliest lexicographic evidence of the Macedonian dialects, described as Bulgarian, can be found in a lexicon from the 16th century written in the Greek alphabet. The concept of the various Macedonian dialects as a part of the Bulgarian language can be seen also from early vernacular texts from Macedonia such as the four-language dictionary of Daniel Moscopolites, the works of Kiril Peichinovich and Yoakim Karchovski, and some vernacular gospels written in the Greek alphabet. These written works influenced by or completely written in the local Slavic vernacular appeared in Macedonia in the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and their authors referred to their language as Bulgarian.

In 1845 the Russian scholar Viktor Grigorovich travelled in the Balkans to study the south Slavic dialects of Macedonia. His work articulated for the first time a distinct pair of two groups of Bulgarian dialects: Eastern and Western (spoken in today Western Bulgaria and Republic of Macedonia). According to his findings, a part of the Western Bulgarian variety, spoken in Macedonia, was characterized by traces of Old Slavic nasal vowels. During the increase of national consciousness in the Balkans, standards for the languages of Slovene, 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.

However, the Russian linguist of Bulgarian origin, Petar Draganov (1857–1928), after his visit to Macedonia, strongly opposed this 'Bulgarian origin of the Macedonian dialects', and he claimed that Macedonia is a separate ethnogeographic unit of the Balkans and the Macedonian dialects form a separate language. Similar ideas were proposed in Krste Misirkov's works. 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 creation of a standard literary Macedonian language from the central dialects of Macedonia that would use a phonemic orthography.

After the first two Balkan wars, the region of Macedonia was split between Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia (later Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Yugoslavia). Serbia 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 parts of Macedonia the respective national languages, Greek and Bulgarian, were made official. In Bulgarian (Pirin) Macedonia, the local dialects continued to be described as dialects of Bulgarian.
During the second World War, most of Yugoslav Macedonia was occupied by the Bulgarian army, who was allied with the Axis. The standard Bulgarian language was reintroduced in schools and liturgies. The Bulgarians were initially welcomed as liberators from Serbian domination until connections were made between the imposition of the Bulgarian language and unpopular Serbian assimilation policies. Even the Macedonian communists were then pro-Bulgarian oriented, but later the Bulgarians were seen as conquerors by the communist movement. However, there were pro-Bulgarian groups which advocated independence as a second Bulgarian state, and others, who supported the union with Bulgaria.

The eventual outcome was that almost all of Vardar Banovina (i.e. the areas that 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 Makedonija" newspaper in 1944. "Makedonska Iskra" (Macedonian Spark) was the first Macedonian newspaper published in Australia, from 1946 to 1957. A monthly with national distribution, it commenced in Perth and later moved to Melbourne and Sydney.

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.

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".

Greeks were objecting to the use of the "Macedonian" name in reference to the modern Slavic language, calling it "Slavomacedonian" (), 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.

The population of the Republic of Macedonia was 2,022,547 in 2002, with 1,644,815 speaking Macedonian as their native language. Outside 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, in Greece, and in Serbia. According to the official Albanian census of 1989, 4,697 ethnic Macedonians reside in Albania.

Macedonian language

Macedonian (;, "makedonski", ) 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.

The modern Macedonian language belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-European language 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.

According to Olga Mišeska–Tomić:

Modern questions of classification are largely shaped by political and social factors. Structurally, Macedonian, Bulgarian and southeastern forms of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian) form a dialectical continuum that is a legacy of the linguistic developments during the height of the Preslav and Ohrid literary schools.

Although it has been claimed that Standard Macedonian was codified on the base of those dialects (i.e. the Prilep-Bitola dialect) most unlike Bulgarian, this interpretation stems from the works of Krste Misirkov, who suggested that Standard Macedonian should abstract on those dialects "most distinct from the standards of the other Slavonic languages". Likewise, this view does not take into account the fact that a Macedonian koiné language was already in existence. The codifiers ultimately chose the same dialects, but did so because they were "most widespread and most likely to be adopted by speakers of other dialects."

A large number of Macedonians live outside the traditional Balkan Macedonian region, with Australia, Canada, and the United States having the largest emigrant communities. According to a 1964 estimate, approximately 580,000 Macedonians live outside the Macedonian Republic, nearly 30% of the total population. The Macedonian language has the status of official language only in the Republic of Macedonia, and is a recognized minority and official language in parts of Albania (Pustec), Romania, and Serbia (Jabuka and Plandište). There are provisions for learning the Macedonian language in Romania as Macedonians are an officially recognized minority group. Macedonian is taught in some universities in Australia, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries.

The varieties spoken by the Slavophone minority in parts of northern Greece, especially those in the Greek provinces of West and Central Macedonia, are today usually classified as part of the Macedonian language, with those in East Macedonia being transitional towards Bulgarian. Bulgarian linguistics traditionally regards them all as part of the Bulgarian language together with the rest of Macedonian. However, the codification of standard Macedonian has been in effect only in the Republic of Macedonia, and the Slavonic dialects spoken in Greece are thus practically "roofless", with their speakers having little access to standard or written Macedonian.

The exact number of speakers in Greece is difficult to ascertain, with estimates ranging between 20,000 and 250,000. Jacques Bacid estimates in his 1983 book that "over 200,000 Macedonian speakers remained in Greece". Other sources put the numbers of speakers at 180,000 220,000 and 250,000, whereas Yugoslav sources vary, some putting the estimated number of "Macedonians in Greek Macedonia" at 150,000–200,000 and others at 300,000. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" and the Reader's Digest World Guide both put the figure of ethnic Macedonians in Greece at 1.8% or c.200,000 people, with the native language roughly corresponding with the figures. The UCLA also states that there are 200,000 Macedonian speakers in Greece. A 2008 article in the Greek newspaper "Eleftherotypia" put the estimate at 20,000.

The largest group of speakers are concentrated in the Florina, Kastoria, Edessa, Giannitsa, Ptolemaida and Naousa regions. During the Greek Civil War, the codified Macedonian language was taught in 87 schools with 10,000 students in areas of northern Greece under the control of Communist-led forces, until their defeat by the National Army in 1949. In recent years, there have been attempts to have the language recognized as a minority language.

The historical and linguistic relationships between the Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are special and complicated. Macedonian researchers claim Macedonian is spoken in southwestern Bulgaria, whereas Bulgarian and Greek linguists argue Macedonian is a variety of Bulgarian.

The rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire began to degrade its specific social system, and especially the so-called Rum millet, through constant identification of the religious creed with ethnicity. The national awakening of each ethnic group was complex and most of the groups interacted with each other.

In 1878, a distinct Bulgarian state was established. The new state did not include the region of Macedonia which remained outside its borders in the frame of the Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, the idea of a common compromise standard was rejected by the Bulgarian codifiers during the 1880s and the eastern Bulgarian dialects were chosen as a basis for standard Bulgarian. Macedono-Bulgarian writers and organizations who continued to seek greater representation of Macedonian dialects in the Bulgarian standard were deemed separatists. One example is the Young Macedonian Literary Association, which the Bulgarian government outlawed in 1892. Though standard Bulgarian was taught in the local schools in Macedonia till 1913, the fact of political separation became crucial for the development of a separate Macedonian language.

The total number of Macedonian speakers is highly disputed. Although the precise number of speakers is unknown, figures of between 1.6 million (from Ethnologue) and 2–2.5 million have been cited; see and. The general academic consensus is that there are approximately 2 million speakers of the Macedonian language, accepting that "it is difficult to determine the total number of speakers of Macedonian due to the official policies of the neighbouring Balkan states and the fluid nature of emigration". According to the censuses and figures, the number of speakers of Macedonian is:

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

Western Dialects:

Eastern Dialects:

The Ser-Drama-Lagadin-Nevrokop dialect and Maleševo-Pirin dialect are also considered Bulgarian dialects.

This discusses the phonological system of Standard Macedonian (unless otherwise noted) based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect. For discussion of other dialects, see Macedonian dialects. Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.

Schwa
The schwa is phonemic in many dialects (varying in closeness to or ) but its use in the standard language is marginal. When writing a dialectal word and keeping the schwa for aesthetic effect, an apostrophe is used; for example,,, etc. When spelling aloud, each consonant is followed by the schwa. The individual letters of acronyms are pronounced with the schwa in the same way: (). The lexicalized acronyms () and () (a brand of cigarettes), are among the few exceptions.

Vowel length
Vowel length is not phonemic. Vowels in stressed open syllables in disyllablic words with stress on the penult can be realized as long, e.g. 'Veles'. The sequence is often realized phonetically as ; e.g. "'colloq." hour'.

The alveolar trill () is syllabic between two consonants; for example, 'finger'. The dental nasal () and dental lateral () are also syllabic in certain foreign words; e.g. 'newton', 'Popocatépetl', etc.

The labiodental nasal occurs as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'tram'). The velar nasal similarly occur as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'English'). The latter realization is avoided by some speakers who strive for a clear, formal pronunciation.

At morpheme boundaries (represented in spelling) and at the end of a word (not represented in spelling), voicing opposition is neutralized.

The word stress in Macedonian is, meaning it falls on the third from last syllable in words with three or more syllables, and on the first or only syllable in other words. This is sometimes disregarded when the word has entered the language more recently or from a foreign source. The following rules apply:

For example, 'child','mother' and 'father'.

For example,'mountain', 'the mountain' and 'the mountaineers'.

Exceptions include:

Macedonian grammar 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 perfect tense formed by means of an auxiliary verb "to have", followed by a past participle in the neuter, also known as the verbal adjective.

Macedonian nouns (именки, "imenki") belong to one of three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and are inflected for number (singular and plural), and marginally for case. The gender opposition is not distinctively marked in the plural. The Macedonian nominal system distinguishes two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), case and definiteness. Definiteness is expressed by three definite articles pertaining to the position of the object (unspecified, proximate, and distal), which are suffixed to the noun.

Macedonian has a complex system of verbs. Generally speaking Macedonian verbs have the following characteristics, or categories as they are called in Macedonistics: tense, mood, person, type, transitiveness, voice, gender and number.

According to the categorization, all Macedonian verbs are divided into three major groups: a-group, e-group and i-group. Furthermore, the i-subgroup is divided into three more subgroups: a-, e- and i-subgroups. This division is done according to the ending (or the last vowel) of the verb in the simple present, singular, third person. Regarding the form, the verb forms can be either simple or complex.

The Macedonian simple verb forms are:

The Macedonian complex verb forms are:
Prepositions (предлози, "predlozi") are part of the closed word class that are used to express the relationship between the words in a sentence. Because Macedonian lost its case system, the prepositions are very important for creation and expression of various grammatical categories. The most important Macedonian preposition is 'na' ('of', 'on', 'to'). Regarding the form, the prepositions can either be "simple" or "complex". Based on the meaning the preposition express, they can be divided into prepositions of "time, place, manner" and "quantity".

As a result of the close relationship with Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian shares a considerable amount of its lexicon with these languages. Other languages that have been in positions of power, such as Ottoman Turkish and, increasingly, English have also provided a significant proportion of the loanwords. Prestige languages, such as Old Church Slavonic—which occupies a relationship to modern Macedonian comparable to the relationship of medieval Latin to modern Romance languages—and Russian also provided a source for lexical items.

During the standardization process, there was deliberate care taken to try to purify the lexicon of the language. Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms, which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favor of words from native dialects and archaisms. One example was the word for "event", "настан", which was found in certain examples of folk poetry collected by the Miladinov Brothers in the 19th century, whereas the Macedonian writer Krste Misirkov had previously used the word "собитие", a Russian loanword ("событие"). This is not to say that there are no Serbianisms, Bulgarianisms or even Russianisms in the language, but rather that they were discouraged on a principle of "seeking native material first".

The use of Ottoman Turkish loanwords is discouraged in the formal register when a native equivalent exists (e.g. "комшија" (← Turk. "komşu") vs. "сосед" (← PSl. *sǫsědъ) 'neighbor'), and these words are typically restricted to the archaic, colloquial, and ironic registers.

New words were coined according to internal logic and others calqued from related languages (especially Serbo-Croatian) to replace those taken from Russian, which include "известие" (Russ. "известие") → "извештај"'report', "количество" (Russ. "количество") → "количина" 'amount, quantity', "согласие" (Russ. "согласие") → "слога" 'concord, agreement', etc. This change was aimed at bringing written Macedonian closer to the spoken language, effectively distancing it from the Bulgarian language with its numerous Russian loans, and represents a successful puristic attempt to abolish a lexicogenic tradition once common in written literature.

The modern Macedonian alphabet was developed by linguists in the period after the Second World War, who based their alphabet on the phonetic alphabet of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, though a similar writing system was used by Krste Misirkov in the early 20th century. The Macedonian language had previously been written using the Early Cyrillic alphabet, or later using the Cyrillic script with local adaptations from either the Serbian or Bulgarian alphabets.

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian alphabet, along with the IPA value for each letter:

Macedonian orthography is consistent and phonemic in practice, an approximation of the principle of one grapheme per phoneme. A principle represented by Adelung's saying, "write as you speak and read as it is written" ("пишувај како што зборуваш и читај како што е напишано"). However, there are occasional inconsistencies or exceptions.

The Lord's Prayer

The earliest lexicographic evidence of the Macedonian dialects, described as Bulgarian, can be found in a lexicon from the 16th century written in the Greek alphabet. The concept of the various Macedonian dialects as a part of the Bulgarian language can be seen also from early vernacular texts from Macedonia such as the four-language dictionary of Daniel Moscopolites, the works of Kiril Peichinovich and Yoakim Karchovski, and some vernacular gospels written in the Greek alphabet. These written works influenced by or completely written in the local Slavic vernacular appeared in Macedonia in the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and their authors referred to their language as Bulgarian.

In 1845 the Russian scholar Viktor Grigorovich travelled in the Balkans to study the south Slavic dialects of Macedonia. His work articulated for the first time a distinct pair of two groups of Bulgarian dialects: Eastern and Western (spoken in today Western Bulgaria and Republic of Macedonia). According to his findings, a part of the Western Bulgarian variety, spoken in Macedonia, was characterized by traces of Old Slavic nasal vowels. During the increase of national consciousness in the Balkans, standards for the languages of Slovene, 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.

However, the Russian linguist of Bulgarian origin, Petar Draganov (1857–1928), after his visit to Macedonia, strongly opposed this 'Bulgarian origin of the Macedonian dialects', and he claimed that Macedonia is a separate ethnogeographic unit of the Balkans and the Macedonian dialects form a separate language. Similar ideas were proposed in Krste Misirkov's works. 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 creation of a standard literary Macedonian language from the central dialects of Macedonia that would use a phonemic orthography.

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.

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

A large number of Macedonians live outside the traditional Balkan Macedonian region, with Australia, Canada, and the United States having the largest emigrant communities. According to a 1964 estimate, approximately 580,000 Macedonians live outside the Macedonian Republic, nearly 30% of the total population. The Macedonian language has the status of official language only in the Republic of Macedonia, and is a recognized minority and official language in parts of Albania (Pustec), Romania, and Serbia (Jabuka and Plandište). There are provisions for learning the Macedonian language in Romania as Macedonians are an officially recognized minority group. Macedonian is taught in some universities in Australia, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries.

Macedonian language

Macedonian (;, "makedonski", ) 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.

The modern Macedonian language belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-European language 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.

According to Olga Mišeska–Tomić:

Modern questions of classification are largely shaped by political and social factors. Structurally, Macedonian, Bulgarian and southeastern forms of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian) form a dialectical continuum that is a legacy of the linguistic developments during the height of the Preslav and Ohrid literary schools.

Although it has been claimed that Standard Macedonian was codified on the base of those dialects (i.e. the Prilep-Bitola dialect) most unlike Bulgarian, this interpretation stems from the works of Krste Misirkov, who suggested that Standard Macedonian should abstract on those dialects "most distinct from the standards of the other Slavonic languages". Likewise, this view does not take into account the fact that a Macedonian koiné language was already in existence. The codifiers ultimately chose the same dialects, but did so because they were "most widespread and most likely to be adopted by speakers of other dialects."

The population of the Republic of Macedonia was 2,022,547 in 2002, with 1,644,815 speaking Macedonian as their native language. Outside 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, in Greece, and in Serbia. According to the official Albanian census of 1989, 4,697 ethnic Macedonians reside in Albania.

The varieties spoken by the Slavophone minority in parts of northern Greece, especially those in the Greek provinces of West and Central Macedonia, are today usually classified as part of the Macedonian language, with those in East Macedonia being transitional towards Bulgarian. Bulgarian linguistics traditionally regards them all as part of the Bulgarian language together with the rest of Macedonian. However, the codification of standard Macedonian has been in effect only in the Republic of Macedonia, and the Slavonic dialects spoken in Greece are thus practically "roofless", with their speakers having little access to standard or written Macedonian.

The exact number of speakers in Greece is difficult to ascertain, with estimates ranging between 20,000 and 250,000. Jacques Bacid estimates in his 1983 book that "over 200,000 Macedonian speakers remained in Greece". Other sources put the numbers of speakers at 180,000 220,000 and 250,000, whereas Yugoslav sources vary, some putting the estimated number of "Macedonians in Greek Macedonia" at 150,000–200,000 and others at 300,000. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" and the Reader's Digest World Guide both put the figure of ethnic Macedonians in Greece at 1.8% or c.200,000 people, with the native language roughly corresponding with the figures. The UCLA also states that there are 200,000 Macedonian speakers in Greece. A 2008 article in the Greek newspaper "Eleftherotypia" put the estimate at 20,000.

The largest group of speakers are concentrated in the Florina, Kastoria, Edessa, Giannitsa, Ptolemaida and Naousa regions. During the Greek Civil War, the codified Macedonian language was taught in 87 schools with 10,000 students in areas of northern Greece under the control of Communist-led forces, until their defeat by the National Army in 1949. In recent years, there have been attempts to have the language recognized as a minority language.

The historical and linguistic relationships between the Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are special and complicated. Macedonian researchers claim Macedonian is spoken in southwestern Bulgaria, whereas Bulgarian and Greek linguists argue Macedonian is a variety of Bulgarian.

The rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire began to degrade its specific social system, and especially the so-called Rum millet, through constant identification of the religious creed with ethnicity. The national awakening of each ethnic group was complex and most of the groups interacted with each other.

In 1878, a distinct Bulgarian state was established. The new state did not include the region of Macedonia which remained outside its borders in the frame of the Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, the idea of a common compromise standard was rejected by the Bulgarian codifiers during the 1880s and the eastern Bulgarian dialects were chosen as a basis for standard Bulgarian. Macedono-Bulgarian writers and organizations who continued to seek greater representation of Macedonian dialects in the Bulgarian standard were deemed separatists. One example is the Young Macedonian Literary Association, which the Bulgarian government outlawed in 1892. Though standard Bulgarian was taught in the local schools in Macedonia till 1913, the fact of political separation became crucial for the development of a separate Macedonian language.

The total number of Macedonian speakers is highly disputed. Although the precise number of speakers is unknown, figures of between 1.6 million (from Ethnologue) and 2–2.5 million have been cited; see and. The general academic consensus is that there are approximately 2 million speakers of the Macedonian language, accepting that "it is difficult to determine the total number of speakers of Macedonian due to the official policies of the neighbouring Balkan states and the fluid nature of emigration". According to the censuses and figures, the number of speakers of Macedonian is:

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

Western Dialects:

Eastern Dialects:

The Ser-Drama-Lagadin-Nevrokop dialect and Maleševo-Pirin dialect are also considered Bulgarian dialects.

This discusses the phonological system of Standard Macedonian (unless otherwise noted) based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect. For discussion of other dialects, see Macedonian dialects. Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.

Schwa
The schwa is phonemic in many dialects (varying in closeness to or ) but its use in the standard language is marginal. When writing a dialectal word and keeping the schwa for aesthetic effect, an apostrophe is used; for example,,, etc. When spelling aloud, each consonant is followed by the schwa. The individual letters of acronyms are pronounced with the schwa in the same way: (). The lexicalized acronyms () and () (a brand of cigarettes), are among the few exceptions.

Vowel length
Vowel length is not phonemic. Vowels in stressed open syllables in disyllablic words with stress on the penult can be realized as long, e.g. 'Veles'. The sequence is often realized phonetically as ; e.g. "'colloq." hour'.

The alveolar trill () is syllabic between two consonants; for example, 'finger'. The dental nasal () and dental lateral () are also syllabic in certain foreign words; e.g. 'newton', 'Popocatépetl', etc.

The labiodental nasal occurs as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'tram'). The velar nasal similarly occur as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'English'). The latter realization is avoided by some speakers who strive for a clear, formal pronunciation.

At morpheme boundaries (represented in spelling) and at the end of a word (not represented in spelling), voicing opposition is neutralized.

The word stress in Macedonian is, meaning it falls on the third from last syllable in words with three or more syllables, and on the first or only syllable in other words. This is sometimes disregarded when the word has entered the language more recently or from a foreign source. The following rules apply:

For example, 'child','mother' and 'father'.

For example,'mountain', 'the mountain' and 'the mountaineers'.

Exceptions include:

Macedonian grammar 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 perfect tense formed by means of an auxiliary verb "to have", followed by a past participle in the neuter, also known as the verbal adjective.

Macedonian nouns (именки, "imenki") belong to one of three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and are inflected for number (singular and plural), and marginally for case. The gender opposition is not distinctively marked in the plural. The Macedonian nominal system distinguishes two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), case and definiteness. Definiteness is expressed by three definite articles pertaining to the position of the object (unspecified, proximate, and distal), which are suffixed to the noun.

Macedonian has a complex system of verbs. Generally speaking Macedonian verbs have the following characteristics, or categories as they are called in Macedonistics: tense, mood, person, type, transitiveness, voice, gender and number.

According to the categorization, all Macedonian verbs are divided into three major groups: a-group, e-group and i-group. Furthermore, the i-subgroup is divided into three more subgroups: a-, e- and i-subgroups. This division is done according to the ending (or the last vowel) of the verb in the simple present, singular, third person. Regarding the form, the verb forms can be either simple or complex.

The Macedonian simple verb forms are:

The Macedonian complex verb forms are:
Prepositions (предлози, "predlozi") are part of the closed word class that are used to express the relationship between the words in a sentence. Because Macedonian lost its case system, the prepositions are very important for creation and expression of various grammatical categories. The most important Macedonian preposition is 'na' ('of', 'on', 'to'). Regarding the form, the prepositions can either be "simple" or "complex". Based on the meaning the preposition express, they can be divided into prepositions of "time, place, manner" and "quantity".

As a result of the close relationship with Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian shares a considerable amount of its lexicon with these languages. Other languages that have been in positions of power, such as Ottoman Turkish and, increasingly, English have also provided a significant proportion of the loanwords. Prestige languages, such as Old Church Slavonic—which occupies a relationship to modern Macedonian comparable to the relationship of medieval Latin to modern Romance languages—and Russian also provided a source for lexical items.

During the standardization process, there was deliberate care taken to try to purify the lexicon of the language. Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms, which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favor of words from native dialects and archaisms. One example was the word for "event", "настан", which was found in certain examples of folk poetry collected by the Miladinov Brothers in the 19th century, whereas the Macedonian writer Krste Misirkov had previously used the word "собитие", a Russian loanword ("событие"). This is not to say that there are no Serbianisms, Bulgarianisms or even Russianisms in the language, but rather that they were discouraged on a principle of "seeking native material first".

The use of Ottoman Turkish loanwords is discouraged in the formal register when a native equivalent exists (e.g. "комшија" (← Turk. "komşu") vs. "сосед" (← PSl. *sǫsědъ) 'neighbor'), and these words are typically restricted to the archaic, colloquial, and ironic registers.

New words were coined according to internal logic and others calqued from related languages (especially Serbo-Croatian) to replace those taken from Russian, which include "известие" (Russ. "известие") → "извештај"'report', "количество" (Russ. "количество") → "количина" 'amount, quantity', "согласие" (Russ. "согласие") → "слога" 'concord, agreement', etc. This change was aimed at bringing written Macedonian closer to the spoken language, effectively distancing it from the Bulgarian language with its numerous Russian loans, and represents a successful puristic attempt to abolish a lexicogenic tradition once common in written literature.

The modern Macedonian alphabet was developed by linguists in the period after the Second World War, who based their alphabet on the phonetic alphabet of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, though a similar writing system was used by Krste Misirkov in the early 20th century. The Macedonian language had previously been written using the Early Cyrillic alphabet, or later using the Cyrillic script with local adaptations from either the Serbian or Bulgarian alphabets.

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian alphabet, along with the IPA value for each letter:

Macedonian orthography is consistent and phonemic in practice, an approximation of the principle of one grapheme per phoneme. A principle represented by Adelung's saying, "write as you speak and read as it is written" ("пишувај како што зборуваш и читај како што е напишано"). However, there are occasional inconsistencies or exceptions.

The Lord's Prayer

The earliest lexicographic evidence of the Macedonian dialects, described as Bulgarian, can be found in a lexicon from the 16th century written in the Greek alphabet. The concept of the various Macedonian dialects as a part of the Bulgarian language can be seen also from early vernacular texts from Macedonia such as the four-language dictionary of Daniel Moscopolites, the works of Kiril Peichinovich and Yoakim Karchovski, and some vernacular gospels written in the Greek alphabet. These written works influenced by or completely written in the local Slavic vernacular appeared in Macedonia in the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and their authors referred to their language as Bulgarian.

In 1845 the Russian scholar Viktor Grigorovich travelled in the Balkans to study the south Slavic dialects of Macedonia. His work articulated for the first time a distinct pair of two groups of Bulgarian dialects: Eastern and Western (spoken in today Western Bulgaria and Republic of Macedonia). According to his findings, a part of the Western Bulgarian variety, spoken in Macedonia, was characterized by traces of Old Slavic nasal vowels. During the increase of national consciousness in the Balkans, standards for the languages of Slovene, 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.

However, the Russian linguist of Bulgarian origin, Petar Draganov (1857–1928), after his visit to Macedonia, strongly opposed this 'Bulgarian origin of the Macedonian dialects', and he claimed that Macedonia is a separate ethnogeographic unit of the Balkans and the Macedonian dialects form a separate language. Similar ideas were proposed in Krste Misirkov's works. 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 creation of a standard literary Macedonian language from the central dialects of Macedonia that would use a phonemic orthography.

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.

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

The varieties spoken by the Slavophone minority in parts of northern Greece, especially those in the Greek provinces of West and Central Macedonia, are today usually classified as part of the Macedonian language, with those in East Macedonia being transitional towards Bulgarian. Bulgarian linguistics traditionally regards them all as part of the Bulgarian language together with the rest of Macedonian. However, the codification of standard Macedonian has been in effect only in the Republic of Macedonia, and the Slavonic dialects spoken in Greece are thus practically "roofless", with their speakers having little access to standard or written Macedonian.

Macedonian language

Macedonian (;, "makedonski", ) 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.

The modern Macedonian language belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-European language 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.

According to Olga Mišeska–Tomić:

Modern questions of classification are largely shaped by political and social factors. Structurally, Macedonian, Bulgarian and southeastern forms of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian) form a dialectical continuum that is a legacy of the linguistic developments during the height of the Preslav and Ohrid literary schools.

Although it has been claimed that Standard Macedonian was codified on the base of those dialects (i.e. the Prilep-Bitola dialect) most unlike Bulgarian, this interpretation stems from the works of Krste Misirkov, who suggested that Standard Macedonian should abstract on those dialects "most distinct from the standards of the other Slavonic languages". Likewise, this view does not take into account the fact that a Macedonian koiné language was already in existence. The codifiers ultimately chose the same dialects, but did so because they were "most widespread and most likely to be adopted by speakers of other dialects."

The population of the Republic of Macedonia was 2,022,547 in 2002, with 1,644,815 speaking Macedonian as their native language. Outside 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, in Greece, and in Serbia. According to the official Albanian census of 1989, 4,697 ethnic Macedonians reside in Albania.

A large number of Macedonians live outside the traditional Balkan Macedonian region, with Australia, Canada, and the United States having the largest emigrant communities. According to a 1964 estimate, approximately 580,000 Macedonians live outside the Macedonian Republic, nearly 30% of the total population. The Macedonian language has the status of official language only in the Republic of Macedonia, and is a recognized minority and official language in parts of Albania (Pustec), Romania, and Serbia (Jabuka and Plandište). There are provisions for learning the Macedonian language in Romania as Macedonians are an officially recognized minority group. Macedonian is taught in some universities in Australia, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries.

The exact number of speakers in Greece is difficult to ascertain, with estimates ranging between 20,000 and 250,000. Jacques Bacid estimates in his 1983 book that "over 200,000 Macedonian speakers remained in Greece". Other sources put the numbers of speakers at 180,000 220,000 and 250,000, whereas Yugoslav sources vary, some putting the estimated number of "Macedonians in Greek Macedonia" at 150,000–200,000 and others at 300,000. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" and the Reader's Digest World Guide both put the figure of ethnic Macedonians in Greece at 1.8% or c.200,000 people, with the native language roughly corresponding with the figures. The UCLA also states that there are 200,000 Macedonian speakers in Greece. A 2008 article in the Greek newspaper "Eleftherotypia" put the estimate at 20,000.

The largest group of speakers are concentrated in the Florina, Kastoria, Edessa, Giannitsa, Ptolemaida and Naousa regions. During the Greek Civil War, the codified Macedonian language was taught in 87 schools with 10,000 students in areas of northern Greece under the control of Communist-led forces, until their defeat by the National Army in 1949. In recent years, there have been attempts to have the language recognized as a minority language.

The historical and linguistic relationships between the Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are special and complicated. Macedonian researchers claim Macedonian is spoken in southwestern Bulgaria, whereas Bulgarian and Greek linguists argue Macedonian is a variety of Bulgarian.

The rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire began to degrade its specific social system, and especially the so-called Rum millet, through constant identification of the religious creed with ethnicity. The national awakening of each ethnic group was complex and most of the groups interacted with each other.

In 1878, a distinct Bulgarian state was established. The new state did not include the region of Macedonia which remained outside its borders in the frame of the Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, the idea of a common compromise standard was rejected by the Bulgarian codifiers during the 1880s and the eastern Bulgarian dialects were chosen as a basis for standard Bulgarian. Macedono-Bulgarian writers and organizations who continued to seek greater representation of Macedonian dialects in the Bulgarian standard were deemed separatists. One example is the Young Macedonian Literary Association, which the Bulgarian government outlawed in 1892. Though standard Bulgarian was taught in the local schools in Macedonia till 1913, the fact of political separation became crucial for the development of a separate Macedonian language.

The total number of Macedonian speakers is highly disputed. Although the precise number of speakers is unknown, figures of between 1.6 million (from Ethnologue) and 2–2.5 million have been cited; see and. The general academic consensus is that there are approximately 2 million speakers of the Macedonian language, accepting that "it is difficult to determine the total number of speakers of Macedonian due to the official policies of the neighbouring Balkan states and the fluid nature of emigration". According to the censuses and figures, the number of speakers of Macedonian is:

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

Western Dialects:

Eastern Dialects:

The Ser-Drama-Lagadin-Nevrokop dialect and Maleševo-Pirin dialect are also considered Bulgarian dialects.

This discusses the phonological system of Standard Macedonian (unless otherwise noted) based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect. For discussion of other dialects, see Macedonian dialects. Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.

Schwa
The schwa is phonemic in many dialects (varying in closeness to or ) but its use in the standard language is marginal. When writing a dialectal word and keeping the schwa for aesthetic effect, an apostrophe is used; for example,,, etc. When spelling aloud, each consonant is followed by the schwa. The individual letters of acronyms are pronounced with the schwa in the same way: (). The lexicalized acronyms () and () (a brand of cigarettes), are among the few exceptions.

Vowel length
Vowel length is not phonemic. Vowels in stressed open syllables in disyllablic words with stress on the penult can be realized as long, e.g. 'Veles'. The sequence is often realized phonetically as ; e.g. "'colloq." hour'.

The alveolar trill () is syllabic between two consonants; for example, 'finger'. The dental nasal () and dental lateral () are also syllabic in certain foreign words; e.g. 'newton', 'Popocatépetl', etc.

The labiodental nasal occurs as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'tram'). The velar nasal similarly occur as an allophone of before and (e.g. 'English'). The latter realization is avoided by some speakers who strive for a clear, formal pronunciation.

At morpheme boundaries (represented in spelling) and at the end of a word (not represented in spelling), voicing opposition is neutralized.

The word stress in Macedonian is, meaning it falls on the third from last syllable in words with three or more syllables, and on the first or only syllable in other words. This is sometimes disregarded when the word has entered the language more recently or from a foreign source. The following rules apply:

For example, 'child','mother' and 'father'.

For example,'mountain', 'the mountain' and 'the mountaineers'.

Exceptions include:

Macedonian grammar 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 perfect tense formed by means of an auxiliary verb "to have", followed by a past participle in the neuter, also known as the verbal adjective.

Macedonian nouns (именки, "imenki") belong to one of three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and are inflected for number (singular and plural), and marginally for case. The gender opposition is not distinctively marked in the plural. The Macedonian nominal system distinguishes two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), case and definiteness. Definiteness is expressed by three definite articles pertaining to the position of the object (unspecified, proximate, and distal), which are suffixed to the noun.

Macedonian has a complex system of verbs. Generally speaking Macedonian verbs have the following characteristics, or categories as they are called in Macedonistics: tense, mood, person, type, transitiveness, voice, gender and number.

According to the categorization, all Macedonian verbs are divided into three major groups: a-group, e-group and i-group. Furthermore, the i-subgroup is divided into three more subgroups: a-, e- and i-subgroups. This division is done according to the ending (or the last vowel) of the verb in the simple present, singular, third person. Regarding the form, the verb forms can be either simple or complex.

The Macedonian simple verb forms are:

The Macedonian complex verb forms are:
Prepositions (предлози, "predlozi") are part of the closed word class that are used to express the relationship between the words in a sentence. Because Macedonian lost its case system, the prepositions are very important for creation and expression of various grammatical categories. The most important Macedonian preposition is 'na' ('of', 'on', 'to'). Regarding the form, the prepositions can either be "simple" or "complex". Based on the meaning the preposition express, they can be divided into prepositions of "time, place, manner" and "quantity".

As a result of the close relationship with Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian shares a considerable amount of its lexicon with these languages. Other languages that have been in positions of power, such as Ottoman Turkish and, increasingly, English have also provided a significant proportion of the loanwords. Prestige languages, such as Old Church Slavonic—which occupies a relationship to modern Macedonian comparable to the relationship of medieval Latin to modern Romance languages—and Russian also provided a source for lexical items.

During the standardization process, there was deliberate care taken to try to purify the lexicon of the language. Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms, which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favor of words from native dialects and archaisms. One example was the word for "event", "настан", which was found in certain examples of folk poetry collected by the Miladinov Brothers in the 19th century, whereas the Macedonian writer Krste Misirkov had previously used the word "собитие", a Russian loanword ("событие"). This is not to say that there are no Serbianisms, Bulgarianisms or even Russianisms in the language, but rather that they were discouraged on a principle of "seeking native material first".

The use of Ottoman Turkish loanwords is discouraged in the formal register when a native equivalent exists (e.g. "комшија" (← Turk. "komşu") vs. "сосед" (← PSl. *sǫsědъ) 'neighbor'), and these words are typically restricted to the archaic, colloquial, and ironic registers.

New words were coined according to internal logic and others calqued from related languages (especially Serbo-Croatian) to replace those taken from Russian, which include "известие" (Russ. "известие") → "извештај"'report', "количество" (Russ. "количество") → "количина" 'amount, quantity', "согласие" (Russ. "согласие") → "слога" 'concord, agreement', etc. This change was aimed at bringing written Macedonian closer to the spoken language, effectively distancing it from the Bulgarian language with its numerous Russian loans, and represents a successful puristic attempt to abolish a lexicogenic tradition once common in written literature.

The modern Macedonian alphabet was developed by linguists in the period after the Second World War, who based their alphabet on the phonetic alphabet of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, though a similar writing system was used by Krste Misirkov in the early 20th century. The Macedonian language had previously been written using the Early Cyrillic alphabet, or later using the Cyrillic script with local adaptations from either the Serbian or Bulgarian alphabets.

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian alphabet, along with the IPA value for each letter:

Macedonian orthography is consistent and phonemic in practice, an approximation of the principle of one grapheme per phoneme. A principle represented by Adelung's saying, "write as you speak and read as it is written" ("пишувај како што зборуваш и читај како што е напишано"). However, there are occasional inconsistencies or exceptions.

The Lord's Prayer

The earliest lexicographic evidence of the Macedonian dialects, described as Bulgarian, can be found in a lexicon from the 16th century written in the Greek alphabet. The concept of the various Macedonian dialects as a part of the Bulgarian language can be seen also from early vernacular texts from Macedonia such as the four-language dictionary of Daniel Moscopolites, the works of Kiril Peichinovich and Yoakim Karchovski, and some vernacular gospels written in the Greek alphabet. These written works influenced by or completely written in the local Slavic vernacular appeared in Macedonia in the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and their authors referred to their language as Bulgarian.

In 1845 the Russian scholar Viktor Grigorovich travelled in the Balkans to study the south Slavic dialects of Macedonia. His work articulated for the first time a distinct pair of two groups of Bulgarian dialects: Eastern and Western (spoken in today Western Bulgaria and Republic of Macedonia). According to his findings, a part of the Western Bulgarian variety, spoken in Macedonia, was characterized by traces of Old Slavic nasal vowels. During the increase of national consciousness in the Balkans, standards for the languages of Slovene, 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.

However, the Russian linguist of Bulgarian origin, Petar Draganov (1857–1928), after his visit to Macedonia, strongly opposed this 'Bulgarian origin of the Macedonian dialects', and he claimed that Macedonia is a separate ethnogeographic unit of the Balkans and the Macedonian dialects form a separate language. Similar ideas were proposed in Krste Misirkov's works. 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 creation of a standard literary Macedonian language from the central dialects of Macedonia that would use a phonemic orthography.

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.

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

The dialects of Macedonian comprise the Slavic dialects spoken in the Republic of Macedonia as well as some varieties spoken in the wider geographic region of Macedonia. They are part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian language with Bulgarian to the east and Serbo-Croatian to the north. The precise delimitation between these languages is fleeting and controversial.

Dialects of Macedonian

Macedonian authors tend to treat all dialects spoken in the geographical region of Macedonia as Macedonian, including those spoken in the westernmost part of Bulgaria (so-called Pirin Macedonia), whereas Bulgarian authors treat all Macedonian dialects as part of the Bulgarian language. Prior to the codification of standard Macedonian in 1945, the dialects of Macedonia were for the most part classified as Bulgarian. In Greece, the identification of the dialects spoken by the local Slavophone minority with either Bulgarian or Macedonian is often avoided, and these dialects are instead described simply as "Slavic", "Dopia" ('Local'), Stariski (old) or Našinski (ours).

Linguistically, the dialects of Macedonia in the wider sense can be divided into Eastern and Western groups (the boundary runs approximately from Skopje and Skopska Crna Gora along the rivers Vardar and Crna) based on a large group of features. In addition, a more detailed classification can be based on the modern reflexes of the Proto-Slavic reduced vowels ("yers"), vocalic sonorants and the back nasal (o). That classification distinguishes between the following 3 major groups:

Northern dialects

Western Dialects:

Eastern and Southern dialects

Most linguists classify the dialects in the Pirin (Blagoevgrad) region of Bulgaria and in the far east of Greek Macedonia as Bulgarian and the dialects in the rest of Greece and in Republic of Macedonia as Macedonian.

As far as consonantal features are concerned, the entire Western region is distinguished from the East by loss of (except Tetovo, Gora and Korča) and the loss of in the intervocalic position (except Mala Reka and parts of Kostur-Korča): (head) =, (heads) =. The Eastern region preserves (except Tikveš-Mariovo and Kumanovo-Kriva Palanka) and intervocalic. The East is also characterised by the development of epenthetic before original where the West has epenthetic : Eastern ("coal") but Western. The diphonemic reflexes are most characteristic of the dialects of Greek Macedonia and Blagoevgrad Province, Kostur-Korča and Ohrid-Prespa. The Serres – Nevrokop dialects have a series of phonemically palatalised consonants.

The Western dialects generally have fixed stress, antepenultimate in the Republic of Macedonia, and penultimate in Greece and Albania. The Eastern region, along with the neighbouring Bulgarian dialects, has various non-fixed stress systems. In Lower Vardar and Serres-Nevrokop unstressed are reduced (raised) to. The reduction of unstressed vowels (as well as the aforementioned allophonic palatalisation of consonants) is characteristic of East Bulgarian as opposed to West Bulgarian dialects, so these dialects are regarded by Bulgarian linguists as transitional between East and West Bulgarian.