Macedonian

Which dialects the standard took

Macedonian grew out of the western dialects of the Eastern South Slavic continuum, whose earliest recorded form is Old Church Slavonic. In 1903 Krste Petkov Misirkov's book On Macedonian Matters made the first attempt at a separate literary language and proposed the Prilep and Bitola dialect as its base. The 1945 standard drew mainly on the West-Central dialects, around Makedonski Brod, Kičevo, Demir Hisar, Bitola, Prilep and Veles. Linguists count 29 dialects in a western group and an eastern one.

What the Cyrillic alphabet adds

Six letters are specific to the Macedonian alphabet: ѓ, ќ, ѕ, џ, љ and њ, the last three taken from the Serbo-Croatian alphabet. Spelling is phonemic, one letter to one sound. Stress falls on the third syllable from the end in words of three or more syllables, and Macedonian and Bulgarian stand apart from other Slavic languages in having definite articles; Macedonian has three, which mark where a thing is relative to the speaker. 5 May is Macedonian Language Day, a working holiday since 2019.

Why Bulgaria and Greece object

In Bulgaria the government, the Academy of Sciences and the wider public consider Macedonian part of the Bulgarian dialect area. Bulgaria recognised it as a minority language and used it in schools from 1946 to 1948, then described it as a dialect of Bulgarian. In Greece, because of the naming dispute, the language is often called Slavic, Macedonian Slavic or the local language rather than Macedonian. Outside Bulgaria, the consensus is that Macedonian is an autonomous language within the dialect continuum.