AUTHOR’S NOTE
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AUTHOR’S NOTEMacedonian is a South Slavic language, one of the State languages of what became Yugoslavia, used principally in the People’s Republic of Macedonia. In the mid-1960s it was spoken by about one million native speakers, including a sizable population in South-Western Bulgaria and Northern Greece.
Macedonian serves about three hundred thousand Albanians and Turks who live in Yugoslavia. The language has nothing to do with the Macedonian of Classical antiquity, which had long since been replaced by Greek, probably a closely related language originating from when the Slavs overran the area and settled there permanently in the seventh century.
The records start with the earliest Old Church Slavonic manuscripts (tenth-eleventh centuries), whose language betrays local Macedonian features not generally thought to have been characteristic of the ninth century Thessalonian dialect on which Saints Cyril and Methodius presumably based their writings.
From the late twelfth century, Macedonians wrote in the standardised types of artificial Slavonic used, with minor variations, by all Orthodox South Slavs.
While a slightly more popular style appears in a few seventeenth century translations, no text approximating to the spoken language is known before about I790.
- Writer
