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Revision as of 03:30, 22 May 2006
- This article is about the Slavic language. For the non-Slavic language spoken in the ancient world, see Ancient Macedonian language.
Macedonian | |
---|---|
Македонски, Makedonski | |
Native to | Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro and in the Macedonian diasporas. |
Region | The Balkans |
Native speakers | 2 million (approximately) [1] |
Indo-European
| |
Official status | |
Official language in | Republic of Macedonia |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | mk |
ISO 639-2 | mac (B) mkd (T) |
ISO 639-3 | mkd |
The Macedonian language (Македонски, Makedonski) is a language in the Eastern group of South Slavic languages and is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia. Macedonian is also spoken in Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and in the Macedonian diasporas in Western Europe, North America and Australia.
Macedonian is closely related to Bulgarian. It also has some similarities with standard Serbian and is closest to the Torlakian dialect spoken mostly in southern Serbia and in western Bulgaria. Bulgarian and Macedonian language share typological similarities with Romanian, Greek, and Albanian. These five languages make up the Balkan language league, even though they are all from different language families (Romanian is a Romance language, while Greek and Albanian comprise their own branches in the Indo-European family).
Along with Bulgarian, Macedonian is the only Slavic language not to use noun cases (except for vocative) and to have a definite article.
History
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. In the ninth century, the monks 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. There is dispute as to the precise region, but it is likely that they were developed on the dialect of the region of Thessaloniki.
In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Turks invaded and conquered most of the Balkans, incorporating Macedonia into the Ottoman Empire. While the written language, now called Old Church Slavonic, remained static as a result of Turkish domination, the spoken dialects moved further apart. Only very slight traces of written Macedonian survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
During the increase of national consciousness in the Balkans, standards for the languages of Slovenian, 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. (see Demographic History of Macedonia)
Although literature had been written in the dialects of Macedonia before, arguably the most important book published in relation to the Macedonian language was On Macedonian Matters by Krste Misirkov, born in the village of Ayii Apostoli (Macedonian: Postol), near Pella in what is now Greek Macedonia. In his book, published in 1903, Misirkov argued for the creation of a standard literary Macedonian language from the central dialects of Macedonia which would use a phonetic orthography.
After the first two Balkan wars, the region of Macedonia was split between Greece, Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia occupied the area that is currently the Republic of Macedonia incorporating it into the Kingdom as "Southern Serbia". During this time, the language of public life, education and the church was Serbo-Croatian. In the other two states, Greece and Bulgaria, the respective national languages were imposed, in Bulgaria, the local dialects were described as dialects of Bulgarian.
During the second World War, Macedonia was occupied by the Bulgarians, who were allied with the Axis. The Bulgarian language was reintroduced in schools and liturgies. The Bulgarians were initially welcomed as "liberators" from Serbian domination. Although as a result of unpopular assimilation policies, reminiscent to an extent of Serbian assimilation policies since WWI, they were quickly seen as "conquerers".
There were a number of groups fighting the Bulgarian occupying force, some advocating independence and others union with Bulgaria. The eventual outcome was that Vardar Banovina (as it was officially called then) 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. 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 Makedonia newspaper in 1944.
The Macedonian language belongs to the eastern sub-branch of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The closest relative of Macedonian is Bulgarian, spoken in Bulgaria, parts of the Republic of Macedonia, Greece and Turkey. Bulgarian and Macedonian properly form a dialect continuum, with the Bulgarian standard being based on the more eastern dialects, and the Macedonian standard being based on the more western dialects.
After Bulgarian, the next closest relative is the Torlakian dialect of Serbo-Croatian spoken in south-eastern Serbia. Following that, the next closest languages are the languages formerly known as Serbo-Croatian. Macedonian is also a constituent language of the Balkan Sprachbund, a group of languages which share grammatical and lexical features based on geographical, rather than genetic proximity.
Geographical distribution
The population of the Republic of Macedonia was 2,022,547 in 2002, with 1,344,815 speaking Macedonian as the native language [2]. Outside of 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 and in Greece. In Greece, although groups may be considered to be speaking dialects heteronomous with standard Macedonian, they may not all identify their language with the national identity. The majority of Slavic speaking Macedonians in Greece generally prefer to identify themselves as Greek [3], or dopii and their dialect as dopia which mean local or indigenous in Greek.
A large number of Macedonians live outside the traditional Macedonian region in the Balkans, with Australia, Canada and the USA having the largest emigrant communities. According to a 1964 estimate, the number of Macedonians living outside of the Republic of Macedonia numbers approximately 580,000. [4]. The Macedonian spoken by communities outside the republic dates back to before the standardisation of the language and retains many dialectic though, overall, mutually intelligible variations.
The Macedonian language has the status of official language only within the Republic of Macedonia. The language is taught in some universities in Albania, Canada, Croatia and Serbia among other countries.
Phonology
The phoneme inventory of standard literary Macedonian contains 31 phonemes. These consist of five vowels, four semivowels, three nasal consonants, 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 [5].
Vowels
Macedonian vowels | |||
---|---|---|---|
Front | Central | Back | |
High | и /i/ | у /u/ | |
Mid | е /ɛ/ | о /ɔ/ | |
Low | а /a/ |
In addition the schwa /ə/ may appear in certain dialects or loanwords.
Consonants
Consonant Phonemes of Macedonian | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bilabial | Labio- Dental |
Dental | Alveolar | Post- Alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | ||||||||
Plosives | p | b | t | d | k kʲ |
g gʲ | ||||||||
Nasals | m | n | ɲ | |||||||||||
Fricatives | f | v | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | x | |||||||
Affricates | ʦ | ʣ | tʃ | dʒ | ||||||||||
Approximants | j | |||||||||||||
Trills | r | |||||||||||||
Laterals | l | ʎ |
At the end of a word, the 'voiced — voiceless' opposition is neutralised. All consonants are pronounced as voiceless.
Word stress
The word stress in Macedonian is antepenultimate, 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 and from a foreign source. For example: Meнаџмент (Management) is pronounced /mɛnadʒ'mɛnt/ with the stress falling on the last syllable.
Grammar
Definiteness (article)
The article is postfixed, as in Bulgarian, Albanian and Romanian. One feature that has no parallel in other standard Balkan languages is the existence of three definite articles pertaining to position of the object. Bulgarian only has the basic (unspecified) form, although three definite article forms also exist in certain Bulgarian dialects, notably the vernaculars of Tran and parts of the Rhodopes [6].
The definite articles | |||
---|---|---|---|
Gender | Distance | ||
Unspecified | Close (this) | Distant (that) | |
Masculine | -от | -ов | -он |
Feminine | -та | -ва | -на |
Neuter | -то | -во | -но |
Plural | -те | -ве | -не |
Vocabulary
As a result of the close relatedness with Bulgarian, Macedonian shares a large percentage of its lexicon with this language. Other languages which have been in positions of power, such as Serbian, Turkish and increasingly English also provide a significant proportion of the loan words. Prestige languages, such as Old Church Slavonic and Russian also provided a lexical source.
During the standardisation process, there was deliberate care taken to try and purify the lexicon of the language. "Serbisms" and "Bulgarisms", which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favour of words from native dialects and archaisms. One example being the word for "event", nastan which was found in certain examples of folk poetry. The Bulgarian and Serbian words that had been in common use were sobitie and dogagaj respectively. This is not to say that there are no Serbisms or Bulgarisms in the language, but rather they were discouraged on a principle of "seeking native material first" [7].
Writing system
The Macedonian alphabet, as any Slavic Cyrillic alphabet, is ultimately based on the Cyrillic alphabet of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius; it is an adaptation of Vuk Karadžić's phonetic alphabet, which is the official alphabet of Serbian language. It is different from Serbian Cyrillic in letters Ќ and Ѓ (which have distinct phonetic value from their Serbian counterparts Ћ and Ђ), while Dze (Ѕ, ѕ) is a unique letter preserved from Old Church Slavonic in Macedonian Cyrillic.
Dialects
A major bundle of isoglosses running roughly from Skopje and Crna Gora along the rivers Vardar and Crna divides Macedonian territory into Eastern and Western regions shows the main dialect regions. The vocalic inventories of the West Central dialects are characterized by a five-vowel system, /a, e, i, o, u/. With the exception of Mala Reka, Reka, Drimkol-Golobrdo, Radožda-Vevčani, Nestram, Korca and parts of Lower Prespa, all the remaining dialects also have phonemic /ə/. Phonemic /å/ is found in all of these latter schwa-less dialects except Mala Reka and Korca. Phonemic /ä/ occurs in Radožda-Vevčani, Suho and Visoka and Korca. Vocalic /l/ occurs in Mala Reka. Vocalic /r/ is absent from those dialects that decompose original r, except Radožda-Vevčani. Korca also has phonemic /ü/.
The modern reflexes of the Proto-Slavonic reduced vowels, "yers", vocalic sonorants and the back nasal (o) can be used to separate the dialects into six groups:
- North (Tetovo, Skopje Crna Gora, Kumanovo-Kriva Palanka)
- Peripheral (Gostivar, Ohrid-Prespa, Kostur-Korca, Lower Vardar)
- West Central (Prilep, Kicevo, Bitola, Lerin)
- East Central (Tikves-Mariovo, Stip-Strumica, Malesevo-Pirin)
- Debar
- Serres-Nevrokop
Western dialects
The dialects of the Western region all tend to fixed stress, antepenultimate in the Republic of Macedonia, penultimate in Greece and Albania. The Eastern region, along with the neighboring Bulgarian dialects, has various non-fixed stress systems. In Lower Vardar and Seres-Nevrokop unstressed /a, e, o/ are reduced (raised) to /ə, i, u/. It must be noted that the Seres-Nevrokop group is in fact located mostly outside of the republic of Macedonia (in Greece and Bulgaria, respectively) and hence its identification as a group of Macedonian dialects is a controversial issue. Bulgarian linguists regard both as dialects of Bulgarian [8]. Interestingly, the reduction of unstressed vowels is characterisic of East Bulgarian as opposed to West Bulgarian dialects, so Bulgarian linguists regard these dialects as transitional between East and West Bulgarian [9].
Eastern dialects
Most dialects have /e/ from original ě, but the Eastern region is characterized by the development of ě to /a/ after /c/: Eastern cal, Western cel (whole). In easternmost Greek Macedonia and the Blagoevgrad Province of Bulgaria ě gives /a/ or /ä/ under stress, in the dialects of Greek Macedonia regardless of the environment, in the dialects of the Blagoevgrad province /a/ if there is a back vowel in the following syllable, /e/ if there is a front vowel, as can be seen in 'white', Serres-Drama: b'ala - b'ali, Suho and Visoka: b'äla - b'äli, Nevrokop: b'ala - bell. In Korca, ě gives /iä/ under stress.
Eastern and Western differences
For consonantal features, the entire Western region is distinguished from the East by loss of /x/ (except Tetovo, Gora and Korca) and the loss of /v/ in intervocalic position (except Mala Reka and parts of Kostur-Korca): glava (head) = gla, glavi (heads) = glaj. The Eastern region preserves /x/ (except Tikves-Mariovo and Kumanovo-Kriva Palanka) and intervocalic /v/. The East is also characterized by the development of prothetic /v/ before original o where the West has prothetic /j/: Eastern vaglen (coal) but Western jaglen. The diphonemic reflexes are most characteristic of the dialects of Greek Macedonia and Blagoevgrad province, Kostur-Korca and Ohrid-Prespa. The Seres-Nevrokop dialects have a series of phonemically palatalised consonants.
Some specific features of the Macedonian language
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. +
- fixed stress on the antepenultimate (third syllable from the end).
- the possibility to form the perfect tense with the verb има "to have" and a neuter past passive participle, as is common in Germanic and Romance languages, and in some non-Slavic Balkan Sprachbund languages. In Slavic languages that have perfect tenses, these are almost universally built with the verb "to be" and a past active participle; that is also an option in Macedonian. The older common Slavic form with сум "to be" is predominant in the east of the country, while the form with "to have" is more widespread in the west, but has spread in the younger generations due to the influence of the standard language. Example: имам галено (new perfect) - сум галил/галел (old perfect) - I have caressed.
- the phoneme "dz". The unique Macedonian letter written as the latin "S" is associated to that sound. Neither Bulgarian nor any other South Slavic language possesses that characteristic letter, and while the phoneme does occur in Bulgarian, it is restricted to foreign proper names and isn't considered a part of its standard phonemic inventory. This phoneme has not been present in Serbian alphabet either since the reforms of Vuk Karadžić in the 19th century, although it is present in all the areas adjacent to Macedonia (Torlakian dialects), and, as in Bulgarian, in foreign proper names. The reason of dropping the letter from both Serbian and Bulgarian alphabets is the fact that the literary languages of those two nations deliberatery avoided the influence of Torlakian or Shop dialects, where "DZ" is frequently pronounced. It is also present in Serbian dialects from Boka Kotorska. [citation needed]
Macedonian has several other interesting features, which, however, are shared with Bulgarian:
- double object (which is avoided in most cases in written Bulgarian)
- the mediative mood (called renarrative mood in Bulgarian linguistics, and sometimes admirative in general linguistics, see mood). The mediative is a mood that designs the transmission of thoughts and enounciations which have been pronounced by another person, but the locutor has heard them through rumors or gossip.
Common phrases
Translation | Phrase | Transliteration | IPA | Remarks |
---|---|---|---|---|
good morning | добро утро | dobro utro | /'dɔbrɔ 'utrɔ/ | |
good day | добар ден | dobar den | /'dɔbar dɛn/ | more common than "здраво" (hello) when greeting |
good evening | добро вечер | dobro večer | /'dɔbrɔ 'vɛtʃɛr/ | |
good night | добра ноќ | dobra noć | /'dɔbra nɔkʲ/ | |
goodbye | пријатно | prijatno | /'prijatnɔ/ | |
please, you're welcome | молам | molam | /'mɔlam/ | |
thank you | благодарам | blagodaram | /bla'gɔdaram/ | formal |
thank you | фала | fala | /'fala/ | informal |
excuse me, pardon me | простете | prostete | /'prɔstɛtɛ/ | |
how are you? | како сте? | kako ste? | /'kako stɛ/ | formal; plural |
how are you? | како си? | kako si? | /'kako si/ | informal; singular |
i'm well, thanks | добар сум, фала | dobar sum, fala | /'dɔbar sum 'fala/ |
Political views on the language
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.
According to the Macedonian view, now prevalent and official in the books in Republic of Macedonia, Macedonian was the first official language of the Slavs, thanks to the St. Cyril and St. Methodius's introduction of Slavic literacy language through the Glagolitic script, that was based on the Southern Macedonian dialect of Thessaloniki (Solun) [10].
Both Bulgarian and Serbian nationalist commentators and linguists have attempted to pronounce Macedonian as merely a dialect of their own respective languages. The academic consensus outside Bulgaria and Serbia is that Macedonian is an autonomous language within the South Slavic dialect continuum [11].
Bulgaria recognised the Macedonian language between 1944 and 1948, the date of the Tito-Stalin split [12]. This date also coincided with the first references efforts of Bulgarian linguists to the Serbianisation of the Macedonian language [13]. Although Bulgaria was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, it has since refused to recognize the existence of a separate Macedonian nation and a separate Macedonian language. Serbia gradually accepted both, although extreme nationalistic views still exist.
Naming dispute
The language is occasionally referred to as Macedonian Slavic, usually in a Greek context. The name of the language is considered offensive by many Greeks, who assert that the ancient Macedonian language is the only "Macedonian language" and that it was a northern Greek dialect. Although Greeks do not generally participate in the language-versus-dialect dispute, they object to the use of the "Macedonian" name in reference to the modern language, calling it "Slavomacedonian" or "Skopian", which are considered pejorative terms by Macedonians.
See also
- Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache
- Balkan linguistic union
- Macedonian alphabet
- Romanisation of Macedonian
- Swadesh list of Macedonian words
- Torlakian dialect
Notes
- ^ Although the precise number of speakers is unknown, figures of between 1.6 million [14] and 3 million [15] have been cited. The general academic consensus is that there are approximately 2 million speakers of the Macedonian language.
- ^ Friedman, V. (1998) "The implementation of standard Macedonian: problems and results" in International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Issue 131. pp. 31-57
- ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica - Old Church Slavonic
- ^ Tomić, O. (1991) "Macedonian as an Ausbau language" in Pluricentric Languages: Different Norms in Different Nations. (Berlin : Mouton de Gruyter)
- ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica - Old Church Slavonic
- ^ Henniger, J. (1994) "Bulgarian and Macedonian." in R. E. Asher, ed. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 1 pp. 429-430. (Oxford: Pergamon Press) [16]
- ^ Malherbe, M. (1995). Les langages de l'Humanité. (Paris: Robert Laffont)
- ^ Popis na Naselenie, Domaćinstva i Stanovi vo Republika Makedonija, 2002 - Vkupno naselenie na Republika Makedonija spored majčin jazik.
- ^ Topolinjska, Z. (1998). "In place of a foreword: facts about the Republic of Macedonia and the Macedonian language" in International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Issue 131. pp. 1-11
- ^ Mahon, M. (1998) "The Macedonian question in Bulgaria" in Nations and Nationalism Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 389-407
- ^ Lunt, H. (1952) Grammar of the Macedonian Literary Language p. 1
- ^ Trudgill, P. (1992) "Ausbau sociolinguistics and the perception of language status in contemporary Europe" in International Journal of Applied Linguistics. Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 167-177
- ^ Friedman, V. (1998) "The implementation of standard Macedonian: problems and results" in International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Issue 131. pp. 31-57
- ^ Стойков, С. (2002) Българска диалектология, 4-то издание. стр. 127, 167.
- ^ ibid. стр. 143, 186.
- ^ ibid. стр. 140, 143.
References
- Lunt, H., (1952), Grammar of the Macedonian Literary Language (Skopje)
- Dorian, Nancy, (1992), "Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death", ISBN 0521437571
External links
- A grammar of Macedonian by Victor Friedman
- Macedonian - English, Greek, Albanian, German, French, Italian translator
- Ethnologue report for Macedonian
- BBC Education - Languages: Macedonian, Makedonski
- The Macedonian Language
- Macedonian - English Dictionary
- Reading and Pronouncing Macedonian: An Interactive Tutorial
- Otto Kronsteiner. The Collapse of Yugoslavia and the Future Prospects of the Macedonian Literary Language
- UCLA Language materials project
- Krste Misirkov - Za Makedonckite Raboti (Complete text of the book)
- Nature of Standard Macedonian lanuage by Mladen Srbinovski