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Macedonian alphabet

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Macedonian alphabet
Makedonska azbuka
"Macedonian alphabet" in Macedonian language
Script type
Period
1945 – present
Official script North Macedonia
LanguagesMacedonian
Related scripts
Parent systems
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Cyrl (220), ​Cyrillic
Unicode
Unicode alias
Cyrillic
subset of Cyrillic (U+0400...U+04FF)
This language reads left to right
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Macedonian alphabet (Macedonian: Македонска азбука, romanized: Makedonska azbuka) is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Macedonian language.[2] It consists of 31 letters.

The alphabet was standardized[3] in 1945 by a commission formed in Yugoslav Macedonia after the Yugoslav Partisans took power at the end of World War II in Yugoslavia. The alphabet used the same phonemic principles employed by Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864) and Krste Misirkov (1874–1926).

Before standardization, the language had been written in a variety of different versions of Cyrillic by different writers, influenced by Early Cyrillic, Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian orthography.

The alphabet

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The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian alphabet, along with the IPA value for each letter:[4]

Letter
IPA
Name		 А а
/a/
A		 Б б
/b/
Be		 В в
/v/
Ve		 Г г
/ɡ/
Ge		 Д д
/d/
De		 Ѓ ѓ
/ɟ/
Gje		 Е е
/ɛ/
E		 Ж ж
/ʒ/
Zhe		 З з
/z/
Ze		 Ѕ ѕ
/d͡z/
Dze		 И и
/i/
I
Letter
IPA
Name		 Ј ј
/j/
Je		 К к
/k/
Ka		 Л л
/ɫ/, /l/
El		 Љ љ
/ʎ/
Lje		 М м
/m/
Em		 Н н
/n/
En		 Њ њ
/ɲ/
Nje		 О о
/ɔ/
O		 П п
/p/
Pe		 Р р
/r/
Er		 С с
/s/
Es
Letter
IPA
Name		 Т т
/t/
Te		 Ќ ќ
/c/
Kje		 У у
/u/
U		 Ф ф
/f/
Ef		 Х х
/x/
Kha		 Ц ц
/t͡s/
Tse		 Ч ч
/t͡ʃ/
Che		 Џ џ
/d͡ʒ/
Dzhe		 Ш ш
/ʃ/
Sha

In addition to the standard sounds of the letters Ѓ and Ќ above, in some dialects these letters represent /dʑ/ and /tɕ/, respectively.

Cursive alphabet

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The letters of the alphabet
The word Македонија ("Macedonia") in Macedonian, written in cursive script.

The above table contains the printed form of the alphabet; the cursive script is significantly different, and is illustrated below in lower and upper case (letter order and layout below corresponds to table above).

The alphabet, rendered in a cursive script style
The alphabet, rendered in a cursive script style
Alternate variants of lowercase Cyrillic letters: Б/б, Д/д, Г/г, И/и, П/п, Т/т, Ш/ш.
  Default Russian (Eastern) forms on the left.
  Alternate Bulgarian (Western) upright forms in the middle.
  Alternate Serbian/Macedonian (Southern) italic forms on the right.
See also:
and

Specialized letters

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Macedonian has a number of phonemes not found in neighboring languages. The committees charged with drafting the alphabet decided on the phonemic principle of Serbian Cyrillic with a one-to-one match between letters and distinctive sounds.[5]

Unique letters

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Map of the phoneme kj (Ќ) in Macedonian
Map of the phoneme gj (Ѓ) in Macedonian

Ѓ and Ќ

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In "On Macedonian Matters", Krste Misirkov used the combinations Г and К to represent the phonemes /ɟ/ and /c/, which are unique to Macedonian among South Slavic languages. In his magazine Vardar, Misirkov used the letters Ѓ and Ќ. Eventually, Ѓ and Ќ were adopted for the alphabet.

In 1887, Temko Popov of the Secret Macedonian Committee used the digraphs гј and кј in his article "Who is guilty?". The following year, the committee published the "Macedonian primer" (written by Kosta Grupče and Naum Evro) which used the Serbian letters Ђ and Ћ for these phonemes.

Marko Cepenkov, Gjorgjija Pulevski and Partenij Zografski used ГЬ and КЬ.

Despite their forms, Ѓ and Ќ are ordered not after Г and К, but after Д and Т respectively, based on phonetic similarity. This corresponds to the alphabet positions of Serbian Cyrillic Ђ and Ћ respectively. These letters often correspond to Macedonian Ѓ and Ќ in cognates (for example, Macedonian "шеќер" (šeḱer, sugar) is analogous to Serbo-Croatian "шећер/šećer"), but they are phonetically different.

Ѕ

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The Cyrillic letter Dze (S s), representing the sound /d͡z/, is based on Dzělo, the eighth letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. Although a homoglyph to the Latin letter S, the two letters are not directly related. Although Ѕ is generally transcribed as dz, it is a distinct phoneme and is not analogous to ДЗ, which is also used in Macedonian orthography for /d.z/. Ѕ is sometimes described as soft-dz. Dimitar Mirčev was most likely the first writer to use this letter in print prior to the standardization of 1944.

The letter Ѕ was used by Kiril Pejčinovikj,[6] Marko Cepenkov,[7] and Dimitar Mirčev prior to the standardization of 1944.

Letters analogous to Serbian Cyrillic

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Ј

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Prior to standardization, the IPA phoneme /j/ (represented by Ј in the modern alphabet) was represented variously as:

  • Й/й (by Gjorgjija Pulevski in "Macedonian fairy");
  • І/і (by Misirkov in On Macedonian Matters, Marko Cepenkov, Dimitar Mirčev, in four of Gjorgjija Pulevski's works, in the "Macedonian primer" by the Secret Macedonian Committee and by members of the Loza movement);
  • Ј/ј (by Gjorgjija Pulevski in his "Dictionary of four languages" and "Dictionary of three languages", and by Temko Popov in his article "Who is guilty?"). Krste Misirkov and Dimitrija Čupovski opposed the use of j and preferred the letter iota (i) instead.[8] Eventually the Ј was selected to represent /j/.

Љ and Њ

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The letters Љ and Њ (/ʎ/ and /ɲ/) are from the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet.[8] Historically, Macedonian writers have also used:

  • The digraphs ЛЬ and НЬ (used by Marko Cepenkov,[9] Gjorgjija Pulevski and in the "Macedonian primer" of the Secret Macedonian Committee)
  • The digraphs ЛЈ and НЈ (used by Temko Popov)
  • The combinations Л and Н (used by Krste Misirkov and Dimitar Mirčev)

Џ

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The letter Џ (representing the phoneme /dʒ/) was adopted from the Serbian alphabet.[8] It was used by Georgi Dimovich in 18th century,[10][11] Kiril Pejčinovikj,[12] Marko Cepenkov,[9] and Gjorgjija Pulevski in four of his works, as well as by the Secret Macedonian Committee and Dimitar Mirčev. Misirkov used the digraph ДЖ.

Accented letters

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The accented letters Ѐ and Ѝ are not regarded as separate letters, nor are they accented to signify a different pronunciation (as in French, for example). Rather, they are the standard letters Е and И topped with an accent when they stand in words that have homographs, so as to differentiate between them (for example, "сѐ се фаќа" – sè se faḱa, "everything is touchable"; "и ѝ рече" – i ì reče, "and he/she told her").

History

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The decline of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-19th century coincided with Slavic resistance to the use of Greek in Orthodox churches and schools. The Macedonian Slavs referred to their language as Bulgarian. There was a disagreement between Macedonian Slavs and Bulgarian Slavs for the basis of standard Bulgarian.[13] At the end of 1879, Despot Badžović published the Alphabet Book for Serbo-Macedonian Primary Schools (Serbian: Буквар за србо-македонске основне школе, Bukvar za srbo-makedonske osnovne škole) written in "Serbo-Macedonian dialect".[14]

From the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913, and until the end of the Second World War, Vardar Macedonia (modern North Macedonia) was part of Serbia (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and occasionally of Bulgaria, and standard Serbian and Bulgarian were imposed as the official languages.[8] The Serbian and Bulgarian authorities considered Macedonian to be a dialect of Serbian or Bulgarian respectively.[13][15][16][17] Some books in Macedonian dialects were published in Bulgaria,[18][19] while some texts in Macedonian dialect were published in Yugoslavia in the 1920s and 1930s as well.[20][21][22]

Standardization

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The Antifascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM) made the Macedonian language official on 2 August 1944. In 1944, Blaže Koneski participated in the first attempts to codify the alphabet, initiated by the Macedonian Partisans in the village Gorno Vranovci.[8] In a meeting of ASNOM on 30 September, a provisional alphabet with 25 letters was proposed.[23] After the capture of Skopje in November 1944,[13] the Presidium of ASNOM met there and appointed the Commission for the Establishment of the Macedonian Language, Alphabet and Orthography to prepare a proposal about the alphabet and orthography of the Macedonian language.[8][24][25]

First Commission

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The first commission's meeting, November 1944. From left to right: Vasil Iljoski, Hristo Zografov, Krum Tošev, Dare Džambaz, Venko Markovski, Mirko Pavlovski, Mihail Petruševski, Risto Prodanov, Gjorgji Kiselinov, Georgi Šoptrajanov, Jovan Kostovski.

The first commission held discussions from 27 November to 4 December 1944, and was composed of Macedonian academics, intellectuals and writers. Apart from Koneski, most of the other members of the commission were not professional linguists. Milka Balvanlieva-Đorđević and Venko Markovski recommended that everyone in Vardar Macedonia should be permitted to write "the way he wants". Gjorgji Kiselinov told the other participants to speed up the work "because we don't have time to wait until one of our dialects develops into a literary language." Milka Balvanlieva and Blaže Koneski suggested the adoption of Serbian Cyrillic.[8] Per Victor Friedman, Koneski did so for linguistic and pedagogical reasons.[13] However, most participants advocated for the creation of a distinct Macedonian alphabet. Koneski argued that most Macedonians were educated with Serbian Cyrillic and insisted that any other choice would make them illiterate. He suggested the Serbian palatal equivalents (ћ and ђ), but the other participants regarded them as "too Serbian." The letter ъ divided Markovski and Koneski, as the former supported it and the latter opposed it.[8] While some Macedonian dialects contain a clear phonemic schwa and used a Bulgarian-style Ъ,[26] according to Friedman and Koneski (being supported by other members of the commission such as Krum Tošev),[23] the western dialects – on which the literary language is based – do not. Koneski objected to the inclusion of the Big Yer on the basis that since there was no Big Yer in the literary language (not yet standardized), there was no need for it to be represented in the alphabet and that by excluding it from the alphabet, speakers of schwa-dialects would more rapidly adapt to the standard dialect.[13] On the other hand, Bulgarian opponents of Koneski indicated that this phoneme is distributed among the western Macedonian dialects too and a letter Ъ should be included in the literary language.[27]

In his memoirs about the commission, Markovski depicted the conflict between him and Koneski as a national one, regarding Koneski among the people with pro-Serbian views, "dubious past" who were "not specialists". Due to his project on the alphabet and grammar not addressed by the commission, mostly because of Koneski, Gjorgji Kiselinov also said that he was marginalized by Koneski as his family was pro-Bulgarian, while Koneski's was pro-Serbian. However, the transcript of the debates does not support the national dimension as Markovski familiarized the other participants with Misirkov.[8] Koneski was only present in the first day because he did not see the realization of productive results and the lack of young people in the commission.[13]

The committee chose the dialects of Veles, Prilep and Bitola (referred to as "central" by the participants")[8] as the basis for the literary language (as Misirkov had in 1903), and proposed a Cyrillic alphabet.[8] Per academic Alexis Heraclides, these dialects were choosen because they were widely used and understood by most Macedonians and distant from both Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. The first version of the alphabet was announced on 28 December 1944.[25] The first commission's recommendations for the alphabet were the following:[8][23]

The commission's recommendations were rejected by ASNOM. Per Friedman, there were two contradictory reasons for the rejection of the commission's work. One was because some political authorities, such as Strahil Gigov, who wanted to involve Russian linguists in the codification, while the other reason was the assessment of the commission's work as inconsistent and insufficiently independent. This latter reason was supported by Koneski.[13]

Second Commission

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The second language commission worked in March 1945. It included Vojislav Ilić, Vasil Iljoski, Blaže Koneski, Venko Markovski, Mirko Pavlovski and Krum Tošev. Per revisionist historian Stojan Kiselinovski, Radovan Zagović and Milovan Djilas from Belgrade intervened in the commission's work, with Serbian Cyrillic being accepted.[28]

Third Commission and adoption

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Official government decree enacting the Macedonian alphabet in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, 16 May 1945. Note the hand-written Ѕ, Ј and Џ in the typewritten line, and the hand-written diacritics added to create Ѓ and Ќ.

With the rejection of the proposals of the previous commissions by Lazar Koliševski and his colleagues,[29] a new commission was convened. It included Vasil Iljoski, Blaže Koneski, Venko Markovski, Mirko Pavlovski, Krum Tošev, Kiro Hadživasilev, Vlado Maleski, Ilija Topalovski, Gustav Vlahov and Ivan Mazov.[13] In April 1945, the agitprop section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia invited Blaže Koneski, Venko Markovski, and Veselinka Malinska to Belgrade for a conversation about the orthography. Per the memoirs of Djilas, Koneski's proposals were accepted.[8] On 3 May 1945, the commission reached an agreement, with the proposal about the alphabet being signed by all participants,[13] and presented its recommendations.[24]

The commission's recommendations were:[8][23]

The Macedonian Ministry of Education accepted the proposal on the same day.[8] On 5 May, the decision about the alphabet was adopted by the government of Democratic Federal Macedonia,[24] which was published in Nova Makedonija.[30] The official adoption of an orthography was realized on 7 June 1945.[24] The governmental decision on the orthography was published in a brochure titled Macedonian Orthography and implemented in the first textbook, Dictionary with Reading Materials for the First Grade.[29] Venko Markovski, Vasil Ivanovski, Pavel Šatev and Panko Brašnarov considered the alphabet as too "Serbified". Due to the absence of a letter for schwa in Macedonian, the apostrophe is used instead.[8]

According to scholar of language politics Tomasz Kamusella, the alphabet is a slightly modified form of Serbian Cyrillic as it uses its graphemes j, љ, њ, џ, while the Macedonian diacritical letters ѓ and ќ were introduced to replace the Serbo-Croatian ђ and ћ.[31] Per linguists Victor Friedman and Brian Joseph, the alphabet was modelled after Serbian Cyrillic.[32]

Commission members

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First Committee Second Committee Third Committee
m denotes military appointee
c denotes civilian appointee
* denotes member who served in more than one committee
Epaminonda Popandonov (m) Blaže Koneski* Venko Markovski*
Jovan Kostovski (c) Venko Markovski* Vasil Iljoski*
Milka Balvanlieva (m) Dare Džambaz* Mirko Pavlovski*
Dare Džambaz* (m) Veselinka Malinska Blaže Koneski*
Vasil Iljoski* (c) Liljana Čalovska Krum Tošev*
Georgi Kiselinov (c) Vlado Maleski* Ivan Mazov*
Blaže Koneski* (m) Kiro Hadživasilev* Gustav Vlahov
Venko Markovski* (m) Dimitar Vlahov Vlado Maleski*
Mirko Pavlovski* (c) Dimče Mireski Kiro Hadživasilev*
Mihail Petruševski (c) Boro Miljoski Ilija Topalovski
Risto Prodanov (m) Ivan Mazov*
Georgi Šoptrajanov* (m) Lazar V. Kostov
Krum Tošev* (m) Vojislav Ilić
Hristo Zografov (c) Georgi Šoptrajanov*
Sources: Victor A. Friedman[13] and Stojan Kiselinovski[28]

Keyboard layout

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The standard Macedonian keyboard layout for personal computers is as follows:

Macedonian keyboard layout

See also

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Footnotes

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  1. ↑ Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.
  2. ↑ "The Macedonian Language". www.cs.earlham.edu. Retrieved 2025-11-18.
  3. ↑ Dimoski, Angel (2025-10-10). "Popov: Officialization of Macedonian alphabet and the Macedonian standard language not an 'artificial construct'". Mia.mk. Retrieved 2025-11-18.
  4. ↑ "Macedonian language, alphabet and pronunciation". www.omniglot.com. Retrieved 2025-11-18.
  5. ↑ Greville Corbett; Bernard Comrie, eds. (2003). The Slavonic Languages. Taylor & Francis. p. 251. ISBN 9781136861376.
  6. ↑ Kiril Pejchinovikj (1816). "Огледало" [Mirror]. p. кб. ...ѕвѢри...
  7. ↑ "Марко К. Цепенков, "Фолклорно наследство", Том 1; Академично издателство "Проф. Марин Дринов", София 1998". Тамо беа (въ ПрилѢпъ) и Димитриа Миладинов и Фони Sинзивов...
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Roumen Daskalov; Tchavdar Marinov, eds. (2013). Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume One: National Ideologies and Language Policies. Brill. pp. 449–457. ISBN 978-90-04-25076-5.
  9. 1 2 Народни умотворения, Марко Цепенков: Сборникъ за Народни Умотворения, Наука и Книжнина. Sofia. 1897. p. 89.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  10. ↑ Gjorgi Pop-Atanasov (1989). Речник на старата македонска литература [Dictionary of the old Macedonian Literature]. p. 57. ISBN 9788636900482.
  11. ↑ Gjorgi Pop-Atanasov (1985). Ракописни текстови на македонски народен говор [Handwritten texts in Macedonian folk speech]. pp. 46, 97.
  12. ↑ Kiril Pejchinovikj (1816). "Огледало" [Mirror]. p. ра. ...чорбаџïе..."
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Victor A. Friedman (2011). "The first philological conference for the establishment of the Macedonian alphabet and the Macedonian literary language: Its precedents and consequences". In Joshua A. Fishman (ed.). The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: "The First Congress" Phenomenon. De Gruyter. pp. 160–172. ISBN 9783110848984.
  14. ↑ Zbornik Matice srpske za istoriju (in Serbian (Latin script)). Матица. 1992. p. 55. Retrieved 22 May 2013.
  15. ↑ "Language Policy and Language Behavior in Macedonia: Background and Current Events", Victor A Friedman, in "Language Contact – Language Conflict", edited Eran Fraenkel and Christina Kramer, Balkan Studies, Vol 1., p. 76.
  16. ↑ Victor A. Friedman (1985). "The Sociolinguistics of literary Macedonian". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 52: 49.
  17. ↑ "Language Planning in Macedonia and Kosovo", Victor A Friedman, in "Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands", edited by Ranko Bugarski and Celia Hawkesworth (2004), p. 201.
  18. ↑ Марковски, Венко. Огинот, Стихотворения, София 1938, 39 с. (, ), Марковски, Венко, Луня. Македонска лирика, София 1940, 160 с. (, ), Марковски, В., Илинден, София 1940, 16 с., Марковски, В., Лулкина песна, София 1939, 40 с.
  19. ↑ Друговац, Миодраг. Историја на македонската книжевност, Скопје 1990, p. 194.
  20. ↑ Друговац, Миодраг. Историја на македонската книжевност, Скопје 1990, с. 92.
  21. ↑ Иванов, Костадин. Ролята на списание "Луч" в национално-освободителната борба на българите във Вардарска Македония, Македонски преглед, бр.2, 2008, pp. 25–51.
  22. ↑ Рацин, Кочо, Бели мугри, Загреб, 1939
  23. 1 2 3 4 Christina Kramer (2015). "Macedonian orthographic controversies". Written Language & Literacy. 18 (2): 291–296, 298. doi:10.1075/wll.18.2.07kra.
  24. 1 2 3 4 Rozita Dimova (2013). "The "Nation of Poetry": Language, Festival and Subversion in Macedonia". History and Anthropology: 140. doi:10.1080/02757206.2012.759112.
  25. 1 2 Alexis Heraclides (2021). The Macedonian Question and the Macedonians: A History. Routledge. pp. 156–157. ISBN 9780429266362.
  26. ↑ Hill, P. (2014). Formation of the Standard Language: Macedonian. In K. G. S. K. T. B. A. P. K. (Ed.), Die slavischen Sprachen/The Slavic Languages: An International Handbook of their Structure, their History and their Investigation (1st ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1470-1477). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110215472.1470
  27. ↑ Кочев, Иван и Иван Александров. Документи по съчиняването на т.нар. македонски книжовен език, София 1993. Stoykov, Stoyko. Bulgarian dialectology, Sofia 2002, p. 177-179 Archived 2010-02-09 at the Wayback Machine (in Bulgarian)
  28. 1 2 Institute of National History; Kiselinovski, Stojan (2017-01-19). "Historical Roots of the Macedonian Language Codification". Studia Środkowoeuropejskie i Bałkanistyczne. 24: 142–144. doi:10.4467/2543733XSSB.16.009.6251.
  29. 1 2 Stefan Troebst (1997). "Yugoslav Macedonia, 1943-1953: Building the Party, the State, and the Nation". In Carol Lilly; Jill Irvine; Melissa Bokovoy (eds.). State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992. pp. 252–253. ISBN 9780312126902.
  30. ↑ Првата азбука е објавена во „Нова Македонија“. Nova Makedonija (in Macedonian). 7 May 2019.
  31. ↑ Tomasz Kamusella (2021). Politics and the Slavic Languages. Routledge. p. 113. ISBN 978-1-003-10018-8.
  32. ↑ Brian D. Joseph; Victor A. Friedman, eds. (2025). "The Balkan Peninsula and Its Languages". The Balkan Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 62–63. ISBN 978-0-521-55349-0. In the nineteenth century, Vuk Karadžić reformed the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet on the principle of one letter per sound, and this alphabet served as the model for the Macedonian alphabet, which became official on May 3, 1945 (see Friedman 1993b).

References

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