The Macedonian language comprises a group of Slavic dialects located in the southernmost part of Slavic linguistic territory and, even in the twentieth century, extending as far as the river Bistrica (Aliakmon) on the border of Thessaly in Greece. The Macedonian dialects were in closest contact with the now-extinct 51 dialects of Albania and Greece, and thus the material provided by the toponyms in these countries is most useful in explaining some problems in Macedonian historical phonology. We also have sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the direct contact between Western Macedonian and the Montenegrin dialects of Serbo-Croatian on Albanian territory was not broken until the period of Ottoman rule, as is attested by several common innovations in the Western Macedonian and Montenegrin dialects which we know took place only during the Turkish period.

Macedonian occupies a peripheral position in the Slavic linguistic world. This periphery, however, has a special place in history because it was the scene of one of the most vital and lasting contacts with the Byzantine world. Also, the fact that a center of Slavic religious and literary activity arose in Ohrid at the end of the ninth century, and the fact that this city became the seat of the patriarchate under Czar Samuil (976-1014) are significant for medieval 51 cultural history, and especially for the development of the Church Slavonic language. After the fall of Samuil's empire, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II demoted the Ohrid church to the rank of Archbishopric, but he guaranteed it autocephaly. The existence of an autonomous ecclesiastical organization in a Macedonian town until 1767, when the Ohrid archbishopric was abolished, gave the entire region a special significance regardless of the historical changes which took place during that long period. However, the fact that the Ohrid archbishopric was soon headed exclusively by Greek archbishops, and that Greek was its official language contributed to the spread of Greek cultural and linguistic influence in Macedonia especially during the Turkish period.

From the above we see only one aspect of the multifaceted linguistic interference which is so characteristic of Macedonian that it can justifiably be considered the most Balkanized South Slavic language. Greek was the language of prestige here, and its influence was felt in writing and in everyday communication. Later Turkish joined Greek as a prestige language, but its influence was almost entirely oral. The situation was complicated by constant contact with Aromanian and Albanian in Western Macedonia in the nearly identical social conditions under which the multilingual population speaking these languages lived. Thus Macedonia has been a region of manifest contact among the Balkan languages. The result of this, especially in some urban centers, is attested to by the description of the situation in Ohrid in 1844 made by V. Grigorovich when he stayed there during his travels through Turkey. He asserts that outside the home people often used Greek and occasionally Turkish. Naturally, this all has been reflected in the phonological development of Macedonian As we will see below, the large number of loans from Greek and Turkish affected the inventory of phonemes as well as their distribution. Instances are also known in which this influence limited the extent of some phonetic changes. Thus, the situation in Macedonian was such that we must always keep in mind the effect of foreign influence on its phonological development.

Aside from this, the Macedonian dialects have been a part of a continuum with the Serbian and Bulgarian dialects for so long, that today it is not possible to draw distinct boundaries between them. As we have already had occasion to mention, the contactwith Serbo-Croatian formerly took place on a larger geographical territory which included Albania. A number of phonological processes are common to this entire area, while on the other hand, some phenomena link Macedonian with the Bulgarian or the present-day Serbian linguistic regions. It is interesting to pose the question of the extent to which contact with the medieval Bulgarian and Serbian states influenced the direction of the diffusion of such phenomena. One cannot exclude the possibility that the close contact of the Macedonian and Bulgarian dialects within the framework of the First Bulgarian Empire (9th-10th centuries) influenced the spread of such older features as *tj> sht and *dj> zht or the shift of the FP (falling pitch) to the following syllable (Bulgarian grad - grad't 'city - the city', Macedonian glas - o' 'voice - the voice'), while the penetration of medieval Serbia into Macedonian regions (l3th-l4th centuries), thereby strengthening earlier contacts, contributed to the spread of changes such as *tj> k' and *dj> g', chr-> cr-, etc. In any case, the task of placing such phenomena of convergence and divergence within a given historical framework is an interesting one, and it can contribute to a more exact definition of their chronology.

This text was taken from Blazhe Koneski's A Historical Phonology Of the Macedonian Language, Carl Winter Universitaetsverlag Heidelberg, 1983, for fair use only.

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Last Modified: September 23, 1996

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