Aegean-Macedonian language

This article describes the Slavic language in Greece, for the Slavic language in Macedonia see Macedonian language , for the Macedonian language of ancient times see Macedonian language .

Aegean Macedonian
Spoken in	Greece
speaker	* approx. 10,000 - 120,000 10,000 - 50,000 20,000 - 50,000 80,000-120,000
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Slavic South Slavic Aegean Macedonian

The ägäis-Macedonian language, also Aegis Macedonian, Slawomazedonisch ( Greek διάλεκτος Σλαβομακεδονική , Bulg. / Macedonian Славяномакедонски диалект) Bulgaromazedonisch (Βουλγαρομακεδονική διάλεκτος, Българскомакедонски диалект), Slavic (Σλαβική διάλεκτος, Славянски диалект) or Entopia (Eντόπια διάλεκτος, Ентопия диалект), denotes the South Slavic language spoken in northern Greece in some localities of the Macedonia region , which is most closely related to Macedonian and Bulgarian . It is often viewed as a dialect of one of the two languages ​​mentioned; In fact, it is to be seen as a southern variant of the dialects of Macedonia and Bulgaria, the image of the East-South Slavic dialect continuum from Bulgarian to Macedonian.

The number of speakers cannot be determined precisely because the use of Aegean Macedonian has declined sharply and it is only spoken predominantly as the first language in a few small villages. Around 10,000 to 120,000 speakers still speak Aegean Macedonian in addition to Greek , and some are trilingual with Vlachian .

A uniform Aegean-Macedonian written language has not developed. The first written records are religious texts from the middle of the 19th century based on the dialects of the respective region for which the Greek alphabet , which is unsuitable for Slavic languages , was used. At the beginning of the 20th century, based on the dialects of Florina , using the Latin alphabet with diacritics, a written language emerged, which, however, did not last long. The newspaper Славяномакедонски глас , which appeared from 1947, was also written on the basis of the Florina dialects, but used the Cyrillic script in the Bulgarian variant.

In terms of its morphology , Aegean Macedonian does not differ significantly from Macedonian and Bulgarian. Here it is most noticeable that the use of the aorist is still common in the Aegean-Macedonian language, while in Macedonian it is almost no longer used. The differences are mainly in the sound structure and very strong in the vocabulary , which has numerous Greek borrowings in Aegean Macedonian (e.g. teachers - New Bulgarian and Macedonian учител, Aegean-Macedonian and Bulgarian даскал ).

Web links

• Further information in the Internet version of the Lexicon of Eastern European Languages (Author: AD Duličenko) (PDF file; 173 kB)
• Report of the European Commission against racism and intolerance, including on the discrimination against Slavic Macedonians in Greece ( Memento of June 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive )

literature

• Christian Voss: Attempts to transcribe the Aegean-Macedonian in the 20th century. In: Zeitschrift für Slawistik 48, 2003, pp. 339–356.
• Iakovos D. Michailidis: Minority Rights and Educational Problems in Greek Interwar Macedonia: The Case of the Primer "Abecedar". In: Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14.2, 1996, pp. 329–343 (PDF; 34 kB).
• Max Vasmer : The Slavs in Greece. Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences, Berlin 1941.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} 2001 Country Report on Human Rights Practices published by the United States Department of State
2. ↑ ^{a b} National Conflict in a Transnational World: Greeks and Macedonians at the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) by Loring Danforth .
3. ↑ ^{a b} Harald Haarmann : Small Lexicon of Languages. Verlag CH Beck , 2001, ISBN 3-406-47558-2 , paragraph on Macedonian .