Macedonian language. Ethnic minority languages
The main dialect groups are Western, Eastern and Northern. The Northern dialect, spoken north of Skopje and Kumanovo, as well as in Dalni Polog, is close to the Serbian language. The southern dialect is heterogeneous. The Western Macedonian dialect, or rather its central dialects, widespread in the cities of Bitola, Prilep, Veles and Kičevo, where the influence of the Serbian and Bulgarian languages was relatively weak, is taken as the basis of the literary language.
According to the point of view currently prevailing in Macedonia, Macedonian was the first state language of the Slavs. The first works of Macedonian literature date back to the 18th century. The Macedonian literary language was codified only in 1945. Political disagreements continue to surround him. Macedonian phonetics are characterized by hard consonants, which makes the language difficult to understand for Russian speakers who have not specifically studied Macedonian.
The stress in the Macedonian literary language falls on the third syllable from the end (with the exception of gerunds, where the stress is placed on the penultimate syllable, as well as borrowings). In phrases, more complex stress rules apply.
The first Macedonian grammar was published in 1946 by Krume Kepeski. Unlike many other Slavic languages (except perhaps Bulgarian), Macedonian grammar is analytical. The case system common to Slavic languages has been lost. Case relations are expressed using prepositions, for example: mirizba na cenoto"the smell of hay." However, the vocative form has been preserved: Stojane! Wife!
The Macedonian language has articles. Nouns can have 3 types of postpositive definite articles depending on the degree of proximity to the speaker, for example: brodot/brodov/brodon (in order of distance).
The future tense is formed by adding a particle to the verb Yes, going back to the verb “to want” (this is the frozen third person singular of this verb, similar to the Bulgarian particle more ) and attached to the present word form: Don't read, don't cry.
There are 4 past tenses: perfect (formed by the auxiliary verb “to have” + passive neuter participle in the past tense: imam seen"I saw"), aorist, imperfect and plusquaperfect.
Infinitive replaced yes-design: in the twilight you can see(compare Bulgarian in the twilight you can see ) "one could see in the twilight."
The comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs is formed by the prefix By-, excellent - with attachment onj-, For example: dobar -> subbar -> najdobar. The comparative form of adjectives can also be used to mean incomplete quality: You're an old man now“He was no longer a young (but not very old) man”; Give me a pogorko cafe"Give me some not-so-sweet coffee."
The Macedonian language is characterized by the use of double pronouns: soooo shut your eyes(compare Bulgarian shut your eyes ) "she closed her eyes."
The main vocabulary of the literary Macedonian language is the common Slavic vocabulary. A significant amount of vocabulary is borrowed from Bulgarian and Serbian. As a result of the centuries-long mutual influence of the Balkan peoples, numerous borrowings from Greek, Romanian, Turkish, Albanian and other languages of the region joined the vocabulary of Macedonian dialects.
The Macedonian language uses a Cyrillic-based alphabet with a number of features. The letters й, ь, е, я, ъ, ь, ы, ю are missing, but there are graphemes that are not in the Russian alphabet: ѓ, ќ, ј, љ, њ, ѕ, џ. Macedonian orthography is quite consistent and phonetic, approximating the "one grapheme per phoneme" principle.
The Macedonian language is studied at universities in Australia, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Russia, Serbia, the USA, and Croatia.
All the necessary materials for studying the Macedonian language - encyclopedic reference, reading rules, dictionaries, phrase books, textbooks, tutorials, grammar reference books, texts - are presented.
Macedonian is spoken as a primary language by about 2-3 million people. It is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and has minority language status in Albania, Romania and Serbia. Standard Macedonian became the official language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1945. At the same time, the main codification of the Macedonian language took place, after which literature in it began to appear. According to 1964 data, about 30% of Macedonians (approximately 580 thousand people) live outside the Republic of Macedonia - mainly in Australia, the USA and Canada.
The Macedonian language is part of the Indo-European family and belongs to the eastern subgroup of South Slavic languages. Its closest relative is the Bulgarian language, with which the Macedonian language has a high degree of mutual understanding. Macedonia has long been part of Bulgaria, and although Bulgaria was the first country to recognize Macedonian independence in 1945, most Bulgarian scholars still consider the Macedonian language to be a dialect of Bulgarian.
The language spoken by the Slavic population of northern Greece is today classified as a dialect of Macedonian. True, Bulgarian linguists consider it a Bulgarian dialect - like the Macedonian language as a whole - but this point of view is rather politically motivated. Unlike the Republic of Macedonia, many speakers of Macedonian in Greece identify themselves as Slavic-speaking Greeks.
The Macedonian language was declared the official language of the Republic of Macedonia at the first meeting of the National Liberation Assembly of Macedonia, held on August 2, 1944. The author of the first official Macedonian grammar was Krume Kepeski, and Blaze Koneski played a leading role in standardizing the literary language. The first document in the literary standard Macedonian language was the first issue of the newspaper Nova Makedonija (1944), and in 1946 the first issue of the newspaper of the Macedonian diaspora, Makedonska Iskra, was published in the Australian city of Melbourne.
In terms of phonetics, the Macedonian language is practically no different from Bulgarian. One of the few differences is the devoicing of final plosives. Another difference is emphasis. In the Macedonian language it is placed strictly in antepenultim, i.e. penultimate syllable (except for recent borrowings), and in Bulgarian it can stand on any syllable.
Compared to other Slavic languages, Macedonian stands out for its frankly analytical grammatical structure: it does not have a case system. Literary Macedonian is the only South Slavic literary language to have three forms of the definite article, based on the degree of proximity to the speaker, as well as a past tense form formed by combining the auxiliary verb "to have" and the neuter passive past participle. Like Bulgarian, Macedonian uses double objects and mediatives.
Since the Macedonian language is a close relative of the Bulgarian and Serbian languages, their lexicon has many common words. The Macedonian language has quite a lot of borrowings from Turkish, English and Russian, because at different periods of its history Macedonia was occupied by Turkey, the USA and the Soviet Union.
After 1945, Macedonian linguists began an active struggle to cleanse the language of Serbian, Russian and Bulgarian borrowings. To do this, they took Church Slavonic words from ancient written monuments as a basis and designed them in accordance with the rules of modern Macedonian morphology. True, this struggle was not crowned with particular success, and now in the Macedonian language a wide layer of vocabulary is presented in two versions - archaic (based on the Old Church Slavonic language) and modern (based on the Bulgarian and Serbian languages): deјtstvo/deјstvo (“action”), persuasive /persuasive (“convincing”), winner/winner (“winner”), etc.
Attracts foreign tourists with inexpensive ski and balneological resorts. The Russian traveler does not lag behind others, and more and more often our compatriots descend onto Macedonian soil via the airstrip. The only official language of Macedonia belongs to the South Slavic language group. Macedonian is spoken by the majority of the republic's two million population.
Some statistics and facts
- In addition to Macedonians, who make up more than 64% of the population, the country is home to half a million Albanians (25%) and 77 thousand Turks (almost 4%). Each nationality has its own language of communication.
- The official language of Macedonia is spoken by at least 1.4 million people in the world. In addition to the republic itself, Macedonians live in and some other countries of the world.
- Macedonian writing is based on the Cyrillic alphabet.
- The largest number of Macedonian speakers abroad can be found in Australia. Almost 70 thousand people speak Macedonian on the “green” continent.
In the footsteps of Old Church Slavonic
The history of the official language of Macedonia began in ancient times with the settlement of Slavic tribes in the Balkans. Linguistic features draw the attention of researchers to written monuments of Old Church Slavonic, preserved from the 10th century. However, the lexical fund of Macedonian consists not only of Slavic words, but also of many borrowings from Turkish, Greek, Serbo-Croatian and other Balkan languages.
Modern Macedonian has three dialects - northern, western and eastern, and the literary language is based on the dialects of the western part of the country.
Note to tourists
The people of Macedonia are hospitable and welcoming and, as elsewhere in the Balkans, there is enough basic English to understand people at a comfortable enough level to communicate. Many words in Macedonian sound similar to Russian and are intuitive even without a translator.
In tourist areas, ski and balneological resorts and in the capital, a significant part of the necessary tourist information has been translated into English. You can make an order at a restaurant using a menu in English, and check into a hotel with the help of an English-speaking receptionist. Not too many residents speak Russian in Macedonia, but some similarity between our two languages will help even those tourists who do not speak foreign dialects get the most out of their vacation.
The question: which of the three languages is closer to Russian is just a reason to speculate about these languages. Well, where do we start?
Let's start with Bulgarian. In principle, it is the Bulgarian language that can be called closest to Russian for several reasons. Firstly, this is the only one of the languages under consideration in which there are no characters that would be absent in the Russian alphabet. This greatly facilitates communication over the Internet. There is, however, one “dirty trick” - this is the fact that some characters are written the same way as in Russian, but are pronounced differently. So, “E” is pronounced like “E”, “Sh” is pronounced like “Shte”, “Ъ” is pronounced like a short “Y”.
Secondly, the words are quite similar. Most of the difficulties arise due to the fact that almost all words have minor differences. As an example, let’s take connectives like “a Russian word is its Bulgarian analogue”: “you work - work”, “Bulgarian - Bulgarian”, “Russian - ruskite” and so on in almost 60% of the vocabulary. There are also cases, and there are many of them, when the same word in Russian and Bulgarian means completely different things. There is a good article on this subject “Caution! Bulgarian language" . The main difference from the Russian language is that the Bulgarian language has no cases. Bulgarian is a fairly rational language, not replete with exceptions, which makes it quite simple to learn.
Now let's look at the Serbo-Croatian language. It is spoken by almost half of the Balkan Peninsula, namely: , (Bosnians have their own dialect, which is slightly different in soft pronunciation). The Serbo-Croatian language already has characters that are missing in Russian.
There are variants of the alphabet in Cyrillic (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic differs significantly from Russian and Bulgarian) and in Latin. All of the above countries use both. The argument that in and the Cyrillic alphabet is used, and in and - have no basis. Rather, Croatia and Bosnia use only the Latin alphabet, while Serbia and Montenegro use both. In the Serbo-Croatian language, just like in Russian, there are cases. Unlike Russian, there are seven of them. A vocative is also added (used when addressing someone). By the way, the vocative case used to be present in Russian as well. A typical example is “father - father”. As far as vocabulary is concerned, Serbo-Croatian has less overlap with Russian than Bulgarian. It is objectively more difficult to teach it.
Now Macedonian. This is the newest language of the three listed. For a long time it was considered a dialect of Bulgarian (Bulgarians still think so). There is a version that it “grew” from Bulgarian in the following way: in personal correspondence, the Bulgarians and Slavs inhabiting Macedonia (let’s call them that, since the Macedonians are a fairly young people, not to be confused with the ancient Macedonians, with whom modern people have no connection, about We’ll speculate on this further), they used the same symbols, the same grammar, but pronounced what was written differently. By the way, knowing Bulgarian, you can communicate with Macedonians almost without difficulty. Those. Macedonians understand Bulgarian phrases, and the answer in Macedonian can be understood without difficulty. The Macedonian alphabet contains characters that are not found in Russian. This is explained by the fact that it was both Serbian and Bulgarian. The Bulgarians and Serbs could not divide this territory among themselves for a long time, and since the formalization of the Macedonian language took place only in the 20th century, some Serbian symbols “crept” into the language and, for some reason, their own were added.
By the way, the formalization of the Macedonian language was carried out with the active participation of linguists from Russia (then the USSR). Perhaps this explains why the language is extremely easy to learn. In any case, you can learn to read Macedonian texts quite quickly. Many people note this. Macedonian, like Bulgarian, has no cases.
As a conclusion, we can state that Bulgarian is close to Russian in its alphabet, Serbo-Croatian in the presence of cases. The basic level necessary for communication in restaurants, hotels, and airports can be mastered fairly quickly if desired. As for the advanced level, Serbo-Croatian will require more effort than Bulgarian or Macedonian.