Macedonian language

This article is about the modern South Slavic language. For the extinct Hellenic language, see Ancient Macedonian language.
Macedonian
македонски
makedonski
Pronunciation[maˈkɛdɔnski]
Native toNorth Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia
RegionBalkans
EthnicityMacedonians
Native speakers
1.6 million (2022)[1]
Dialects
Official status
Official language in
 North Macedonia
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated byMacedonian Language Institute "Krste Misirkov" at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje
Language codes
ISO 639-1mk
ISO 639-2mac (B)
mkd (T)
ISO 639-3mkd
Glottologmace1250
Linguasphere(part of 53-AAA-h) 53-AAA-ha (part of 53-AAA-h)
The Macedonian-speaking world:[image reference needed]
  regions where Macedonian is the language of the majority
  regions where Macedonian is the language of a minority
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Macedonian (/ˌmæsɪˈdoʊniən/ MASS-ih-DOH-nee-ən; македонски јазик, translit. makedonski jazik, pronounced [maˈkɛdɔnski ˈjazik] ⓘ) is an Eastern South Slavic language. It is part of the Indo-European language family, and is one of the Slavic languages, which are part of a larger Balto-Slavic branch. Spoken as a first language by around 1.6 million people, it serves as the official language of North Macedonia.[1] Most speakers can be found in the country and its diaspora, with a smaller number of speakers throughout the transnational region of Macedonia. Macedonian is also a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Serbia and it is spoken by emigrant communities predominantly in Australia, Canada and the United States.

Macedonian developed out of the western dialects of the Eastern South Slavic dialect continuum, whose earliest recorded form is Old Church Slavonic. During much of its history, this dialect continuum was called "Bulgarian",[5][additional citation(s) needed] although in the late 19th century, its western dialects came to be known separately as "Macedonian".[citation needed] Standard Macedonian was codified in 1945 and has developed modern literature since.[6] As it is part of a dialect continuum with other South Slavic languages, Macedonian has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Bulgarian and varieties of Serbo-Croatian.

Linguists distinguish 29 dialects of Macedonian, with linguistic differences separating Western and Eastern groups of dialects. Some features of Macedonian grammar are the use of a dynamic stress that falls on the ante-penultimate syllable, three suffixed deictic articles that indicate noun position in reference to the speaker and the use of simple and complex verb tenses. Macedonian orthography is phonemic with a correspondence of one grapheme per phoneme. It is written using an adapted 31-letter version of the Cyrillic script with six original letters. Macedonian syntax is the same as of all other modern Slavic languages, i.e. of the subject-verb-object (SVO) type and has flexible word order.[7][8]

Macedonian vocabulary has been historically influenced by Turkish and Russian. Somewhat less prominent vocabulary influences also came from neighboring and prestige languages. The international consensus outside of Bulgaria is that Macedonian is an autonomous language within the Eastern South Slavic dialect continuum, although since Macedonian and Bulgarian are mutually intelligible and are socio-historically related, a small minority of linguists are divided in their views of the two as separate languages or as a single pluricentric language.[9][10][11]

5 May, the day when the government of Yugoslav Macedonia adopted the Macedonian alphabet as the official script of the republic, is marked as Macedonian Language Day.[12] This is a working holiday, declared as such by the government of North Macedonia in 2019.[13]

  1. ^ a b Macedonian at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference bih was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference rou was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference serbia was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Hupchick, Dennis P. (1995). Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 143. ISBN 0312121164. The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the Macedonian nationalists for a separate Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern Macedonian literary language was mandated by the communist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian
  6. ^ Thornburg & Fuller 2006, p. 213.
  7. ^ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Slavic-languages/Grammatical-characteristics
  8. ^ Siewierska, Anna, and Ludmila Uhlirova. "An overview of word order in Slavic languages." Empirical approaches to language typology 20 (1998): 105-150.
  9. ^ Reimann 2014, p. 41.
  10. ^ Trudgill 1992.
  11. ^ Raúl Sánchez Prieto, Politics shaping linguistic standards: the case of Dutch in Flanders and Bulgaro-Macedonian in the Republic of Macedonia, in: Exploring linguistic standards in non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages, ISBN 3631625839, pp.227-244; Peter Lang, with Carla Amoros Negre et al. as eds.
  12. ^ "5 мај – Ден на македонскиот јазик". Филолошки факултет "Блаже Конески" – Скопје (in Macedonian). Retrieved 7 January 2024.
  13. ^ "Од 130-тата седница на Владата на РСМ: 5 Мај прогласен за Ден на македонскиот јазик". Влада на Република Северна Македонија (in Macedonian). 16 April 2019. Retrieved 11 June 2023.