Macedonian Migration Translator

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About the Macedonian Language

Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora.

The modern Macedonian language belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-European language family, together with Bulgarian and the extinct Old Church Slavonic. Macedonian's closest relative is Bulgarian

Language contact between Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian reached its height during Yugoslav times when most Macedonians learned Serbo-Croatian as a compulsory language of education and knew and used a mixture of Serbian and Macedonian Serbian, or "pseudo-Serbian." All South Slavic languages, including Macedonian, form a dialect continuum. Macedonian, along with Bulgarian and Torlakian (transitional varieties of Serbo-Croatian), falls into the Balkan Slavic linguistic area, which is part of the broader Balkan sprachbund, a group of languages that share typological, grammatical and lexical features based on geographical convergence, rather than genetic proximity. Other principal languages in this continuum are Romanian, Greek and Albanian, all of which belong to different genetic branches of the Indo-European family (Romanian is a Romance language, whereas Greek and Albanian comprise separate branches).

Macedonian and Bulgarian are sharply divergent from the remaining South Slavic languages, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene, and indeed all other Slavic languages, in that they do not use noun cases (except for the vocative, and apart from some traces of once productive inflections still found scattered throughout the languages) and have lost the infinitive. Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Indo-European languages that make use of the narrative mood.