Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: What language is spoken in Macedonia?
Macedonian (/ˌmæsɪˈdoʊniən/; македонски, tr. makedonski, pronounced[maˈkɛdɔnski ˈjazik](listen)) is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by around two million people, principally in the Republic of Macedonia and the Macedonian diaspora, with a smaller number of speakers throughout the transnational region of Macedonia. It is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Romania, and Serbia.
Macedonian (, "makedonski jazik") is a South Slavic language, spoken as a first language by approximately 1.4-2.5 million people principally in Macedonia and the Macedonian diaspora. It is the official language in Macedonia and a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Romania and Serbia.
The varieties spoken by the Slavophone minority in parts of northern Greece, especially those in the Greek provinces of West and Central Macedonia, are today usually classified as part of the Macedonian language, with those in East Macedonia being transitional towards Bulgarian.[53] Bulgarian linguistics traditionally regards them all as part of the Bulgarian language together with the rest of Macedonian.[54][55] However, the codification of standard Macedonian has been in effect only in the Republic of Macedonia, and the Slavonic dialects spoken in Greece are thus practically "roofless",[56] with their speakers having little access to standard or written Macedonian.
There are other language groupings in Southern Europe. Albanian is spoken in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, and parts of Italy (particularly by the Arbëreshë people in Southern Italy) and Greece, and Serbo-Croatian is spoken in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro. Slovenian is spoken in Slovenia, Italy (in Friuli-Venezia Giulia) and Croatia (in Istria) and Macedonian is spoken in Macedonia. Maltese is a Semitic language that is the official language of Malta, descended from Siculo-Arabic, but written in the Latin script with heavy Latin and Italian influences. The Basque language is spoken in the Basque Country, a region in northern Spain and southwestern France.
The Ohrid Framework Agreement, which was signed on 13 August 2001, put an official end to the armed conflict. The agreement set the groundwork for increasing the rights of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia. The Agreement also included provisions for altering the official languages of the country, with any language spoken by over 20% of the population becoming co-official with the Macedonian language on the municipal level. Currently only Albanian, spoken by approximately 25% of the population, fulfils this criterion. According to the document, the version in English is the only authentic version of the Ohrid Framework Agreement.
In 1845 the Russian scholar Viktor Grigorovich travelled in the Balkans to study the south Slavic dialects of Macedonia. His work articulated for the first time a distinct pair of two groups of Bulgarian dialects: Eastern and Western (spoken in today Western Bulgaria and Republic of Macedonia). According to his findings, a part of the Western Bulgarian variety, spoken in Macedonia, was characterized by traces of Old Slavic nasal vowels.[160] During the increase of national consciousness in the Balkans, standards for the languages of Slovene, 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.
Although Bulgaria was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, most of its academics, as well as the general public, regard the language spoken there as a form of Bulgarian. However, after years of diplomatic impasse caused by an academic dispute, in 1999 the government in Sofia solved the problem with the Macedonian Language under the formula: "the official language of the country (Republic of Macedonia) in accordance with its constitution".
Romanians, known by the exonym Vlachs in the Middle Ages, speak a language descended from the Vulgar Latin that was once spoken in south-eastern Europe. Inscriptions from the Roman period prove that a line, known as the "Jireček Line", can be drawn through the Balkan Peninsula, which separated the Latin-speaking northern provinces, including Dacia, Moesia and Pannonia from the southern regions where Greek remained the predominant language. Eastern Romance now has four variants, which are former dialects of a Proto-Romanian language. Daco-Romanian, the official language of Romania, is the most widespread of the four variants. Speakers of the Aromanian language live in scattered communities in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Macedonia. Another two, by now nearly extinct variants, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian, are spoken in some villages in Macedonia and Greece, and in Croatia, respectively. Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian are spoken in the central and southern regions of the Balkans, indicating that they migrated to these territories in the Middle Ages.
The Thracian language was spoken in what is now Bulgaria, Romania, Republic of Macedonia, Northern Greece, European Turkey and in parts of Bithynia (North-Western Asiatic Turkey).
It is generally considered that sometime between 800 and 1,200 years ago, Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire, which is also known as Proto-Eastern Romance, broke up into four languages: Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian. One possibility for the origin of Aromanian is that in the same way standard Romanian is believed to be descended from the Latin spoken by the Getae (Dacians ["Daco-Thracians"] and Roman settlers in what is now Romania), Aromanian descended from the Latin spoken by Thracian and Illyrian peoples living in the southern Balkans (Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace).
Megleno-Romanian (known as "Vlăhește" by its speakers, and Megleno-Romanian or Meglenitic and sometimes Moglenitic or Meglinitic by linguists) is an Eastern Romance language, similar to Aromanian or a dialect of the Romanian language. It is spoken by the Megleno-Romanians in a few villages in the Moglena region that spans the border between the Greek region of Macedonia and the Republic of Macedonia. It is also spoken by emigrants from these villages and their descendants in Romania and by a small Muslim group in Turkey. It is considered an endangered language.
Macedonian authors tend to treat all dialects spoken in the geographical region of Macedonia as Macedonian, including those spoken in the westernmost part of Bulgaria (so-called Pirin Macedonia), whereas Bulgarian authors treat all Macedonian dialects as part of the Bulgarian language. Prior to the codification of standard Macedonian in 1945, the dialects of Macedonia were for the most part classified as Bulgarian. In Greece, the identification of the dialects spoken by the local Slavophone minority with either Bulgarian or Macedonian is often avoided, and these dialects are instead described simply as "Slavic", "Dopia" ('Local'), Stariski (old) or Našinski (ours).
Serbian (српски, "srpski") is a standardized register of the Serbo-Croatian language spoken by Serbs, mainly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Macedonia. It is official in Serbia and one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is the principal language of the Serbs. Serbian is mainly spoken in the municipalities of Čučer Sandevo (~20% of the population) and Staro Nagoričane (19%).
After the defeat of Andriscus in 148 BC, Macedonia officially became a province of the Roman Republic in 146 BC. Hellenization of the non-Greek population was not yet complete in 146 BC, and many of the Thracian and Illyrian tribes had preserved their languages. It is also possible that the ancient Macedonian tongue was still spoken, alongside Koine, the common Greek language of the Hellenistic era. From an early period, the Roman province of Macedonia included Epirus, Thessaly, parts of Thrace and Illyria, thus making the region of Macedonia permanently lose connection to its ancient borders, and now including various inhabitants.
Misirkov argued that a standard Macedonian literary language, in which Macedonians should write, study, and worship, should be created, based on the dialects spoken in the west-central part of what is today Republic of Macedonia; the autocephalous [[Orthodox Archbishopric of Ohrid (ancient)|Archbishopric of Ohrid]] should be restored; and the Slavic people of Macedonia should be identified in their Ottoman identity cards ("[[nofuz]]") as "Macedonians".
Balkan Romani () is one of several related languages of the Romani people, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Many varieties of Romani are divergent and sometimes considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romani (about 900,000 speakers), Balkan Romani (700,000), Carpathian Romani (500,000) and Sinti Romani (300,000). In Macedonia Balkan Romani is spoken. Šuto Orizari is the largest Romani-speaking settlement in the country.
Greek is by far the most widely spoken and the only official language of public life and education in Macedonia. The local Macedonian dialect is spoken alongside dialects from other parts of Greece and Pontic Greek still spoken by some Greeks of Pontic descent. One archaic Greek dialect indigenous to Greek Macedonia and other parts of Northern Greece is that spoken by the Sarakatsani, a traditionally transhument shepherd community whose dialect has undergone very little change through foreign influences. Macedonian Slavic dialects are the most widely spoken minority language while Aromanian, Arvanitic, Megleno-Romanian, Turkish and Romani are also spoken. Ladino is still spoken by some Jews in Thessaloniki.
The dialects of Macedonian were for the most part classified as part of Bulgarian in the older literature. The Bulgarian linguistics continue to treat it as such in.
Since the second half of the 20th century, foreign authors have mostly adopted the convention of treating these in terms of a separate Macedonian language, following the codification of Macedonian as the literary standard language of Yugoslav Macedonia. However, some contemporary linguists still consider Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian. Macedonian authors in turn tend to treat all dialects spoken in the geographical region of Macedonia as Macedonian, including those spoken in Bulgarian Macedonia. Together with their closest lexical and grammatical relative they comprise the Eastern South Slavic branch. The present article treats all these dialects together, because of their close structural similarity and the fact that many important dialect boundaries intersect both territories.
Greek had been in use in the southern part of the Balkans since the late 4th century BC, as a result of the Macedonian conquests of Philip and Alexander. The ancient Macedonian language, perhaps a Greek dialect,[146] may have been spoken in some parts of what is now Macedonia and northern Greece; to the north of this area, Paeonian would have been used, and to the south Epirot, both scantily attested.[147]
The dialects of Macedonian comprise the Slavic dialects spoken in the Republic of Macedonia as well as some varieties spoken in the wider geographic region of Macedonia. They are part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian language with Bulgarian to the east and Serbo-Croatian to the north. The precise delimitation between these languages is fleeting and controversial.
In the 6th and 7th centuries AD, Slavic people migrated into northern Greece and competed with the Greek ethnic population of Macedonia, although over time adopting the Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Cyrillic script from Greek Macedonians. and Slavic languages have been spoken in the area alongside Greek in the region ever since. In parts of northern Greece, in the regions of Macedonia (Μακεδονία) and Thrace (Θράκη), Slavic languages continue to be spoken by people with a wide range of self-identifications. The actual linguistic classification of these dialects is unclear, although most linguists will classify them as either Bulgarian or Macedonian Slavic taking into account numerous factors, including the resemblance and mutual intelligibility of each dialect to the standard languages ("abstand"), and the self-identification of the speakers themselves. As however the vast majority of these people have a Greek national identity, linguists will make their decisions based on "abstand" alone. The Slavic-speaking minority of northern Greece can be divided in two main groups: Orthodox Christians and Muslims, primarily the Pomaks of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. The latter has no reported connection to ethnic Macedonians.
The existence of a Macedonian language and Macedonian ethnos is highly disputed in Bulgaria. Most Bulgarians do not recognize the Macedonian language as a separate language and assert that it is a dialect of Bulgarian. There are two dialects in Bulgaria which are considered Macedonian in Macedonia: the Maleševo-Pirin (widely spoken in most of Blagoevgrad Province in Bulgaria and Delčevo region in the Republic of Macedonia) and the Ser-Drama-Lagadin-Nevrokop ones. Some linguists consider these dialects to be transitional between modern Bulgarian and Macedonian.
In most sources in and out of Bulgaria before the Second World War, the southern Slavonic dialect continuum covering the area of today's Republic of Macedonia and Northern Greece was referred to as a group of Bulgarian dialects. The local variants of the name of the language were also balgàrtzki, bùgarski or bugàrski; i.e. Bulgarian.[169] Although Bulgaria was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, most of its academics, as well as the general public, regard the language spoken there as a form of Bulgarian. However, after years of diplomatic impasse caused by an academic dispute, in 1999 the government in Sofia solved the problem of the Macedonian language by using the euphemistic formula: "the official language of the country (Republic of Macedonia) in accordance with its constitution".[170]
Albanian () is an Indo-European language spoken by over 7.3 million people world-wide, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and Greece. Albanian is also spoken in centuries-old Albanian-based dialect speaking communities scattered in southern Greece, southern Italy, Sicily, Ukraine and the Albanian diaspora. Within Macedonia, Albanian is spoken in Western parts of the Republic.
The question of what language was spoken in ancient Macedonia has been debated by Greek, Macedonian, and other scholars. The discovery of the Pella curse tablet in 1986, found in Pella, the ancient capital of Macedon, has given us a text written in a distinct Doric Greek idiom. Ιt contains a curse or magic spell (Greek: κατάδεσμος, "katadesmos") inscribed on a lead scroll, dated to the first half of the 4th century BC (c. 375–350 BC). It was published in the "Hellenic Dialectology" Journal in 1993. It is one of four texts found until today that might represent a local dialectal form of ancient Greek in Macedonia, all of them identifiable as Doric. These confirm that a Doric Greek dialect was spoken in Macedonia, as was previously expected from the West Greek forms of names found in Macedonia. As a result, the Pella curse tablet has been forwarded as a strong argument that the Ancient Macedonian language was a dialect of North-Western Greek, part of the Doric dialects.