Macedonian Language - Classification and Related Languages

Classification and Related Languages

The Macedonian language belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-European language family, together with Bulgarian. The modern Macedonian language is unrelated to the Ancient Macedonian language. Macedonian's closest relative is Bulgarian, with which it has a high degree of mutual intelligibility. The next closest relative is Serbo-Croatian (and its standard variants Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, and Croatian).

All South Slavic languages, including Macedonian, form a dialect continuum. Macedonian, along with Bulgarian and the transitional southern Serbian varieties (Torlakian) also forms a part of the Balkan Sprachbund, a group of languages which 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 of languages (Romanian is a Romance language, while Greek and Albanian each comprise their own 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 don't use noun cases (except for the vocative, and apart from some traces of once productive inflections still found scattered throughout the languages). They are also the only Slavic languages with any definite articles, but only Macedonian has got three: unspecified, proximate and distal article.

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 while the Bulgarians had elsewhere been described as speaking a dialect of Serbian. 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". Some other linguists, such as Antoine Meillet, also considered Macedonian dialects as comprising an independent language group distinct from both Bulgarian and Serbian. Some linguists still consider Macedonian and Bulgarian to be dialects of a single language, but this view is politically controversial.

While it is often claimed that Standard Macedonian was codified on the base of those dialects (i.e. the Prilep-Bitola dialect) which were 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".

Language contact between Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian reached its height during Yugoslav times, so much so that the colloquial speech of the city of Skopje has been described as a "creolized form of Serbian" (cf. also Surzhyk in Ukraine, Trasianka in Belarus).