Distinguished President of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Academician Zivko Popov,
Esteemed Guests,
Dear Friends,
Today we have gathered in our temple of science and art to recollect one of the most important moments in the Macedonian history – the codification of the standard Macedonian language.
On 5 May 1945, the decision of the then people’s government of Macedonia on the Macedonian alphabet was published on the pages of our first daily newspaper “Nova Makedonija”. A month later, on June 7, the Macedonian orthography was adopted. With these decisions, the long process of defining and codifying the Macedonian literary language was finalized.
It is not possible to codify a non-existent language. The path that the Macedonian language has taken, from its inception in the dawn of the Slavic literacy to its final literary codification, is in many ways similar to the one taken by other literary languages. If we follow closely that path, we will see that it passed through the labyrinth of medieval redactions, made its way through the long centuries of folk creativity, patiently collected by the revivalists Miladinovci Borthers and Cepenkov. Along that path, we come across the moral teachings of Krcovski and Pejcinovic, the textbooks of Zografski, Sapkarev and Macukovski, the sermons of Prlicev, the dictionaries of Pulevski… Following that path, we walk with the Winegrowers, with the Young Macedonian Literary Society and the Macedonian Scientific and Literary Friendship of Cupovski, to finally get acquainted with the monumental work of our greatest linguistic genius Krste Petkov Misirkov.
It was Misirkov with his book “On the Macedonian Affairs” who made a bold and deeply thoughtful feat in the development of our literary language. He was aware that it precisely depended on the resolution of the language issue that the Macedonian people would continue on the path of freedom or would stray into the blind alleys of Balkan nationalisms. He knew that, as a linguistic equidistance from the neighboring Slavic languages, it was precisely the central Macedonian dialects that should be the basis of the Macedonian literary language. Likewise, that the orthography should be phonetic and that the dictionary of the Macedonian language should be enriched with words from all its dialects.
The soundness of Misirkov’s views is evidenced by the fact that he anticipated the ASNOM decisions and the decisions of the Language and Orthography Commission for the next forty years.
Distinguished Guests,
The path to codification was not easy because the Macedonian language was systematically suppressed and denied by neighboring propaganda. Its medieval manuscripts were looted or destroyed, its speakers were forcibly assimilated or persecuted, and the language itself was treated as a dialect of one or another language which is indeed foreign to us.
The following speaks to this: many of the banned books in the Balkans in the past two centuries were written in Macedonian. Almost all copies of the book “On the Macedonian Affairs” were destroyed. The ‘Alphabet’, published at the request of the League of Nations, never reached the students for whom it was intended. At the beginning of World War II, there were attempts to seize and destroy all copies of Racin’s “White Dawns”.
Despite these pressures, the codification did not stop, but continued, along partisan paths. The fighters of the National Liberation and Anti-Fascist Struggle also became fighters for the Macedonian language. The correspondence, proclamations and manifestos of the National Liberation Struggle were written in Macedonian.
The first, state-forming session of ASNOM was also held in Macedonian, whose delegates adopted the decision to introduce the Macedonian as the official language of the Macedonian state. Not coincidentally, one of the first decisions was to form a Language and Orthography Commission to finalize the codification of the Macedonian language.
Blaze Koneski testifies that “the members of the Language and Orthography Commission did not invent anything, but only listened to what progressively prevailed in the understandings of their predecessors”. The task of the Commission was “to grasp the threads of everything that was created in our written activity… in order to establish the definitive form of the Macedonian literary language”.
In doing so, the Commission resisted the great temptation to choose the easy way out – and that is to seek help from foreign experts. Instead of an externally imposed solution, they decided on our own indigenous solution to the Macedonian language issue, in the spirit of Misirkov.
Blaze Koneski, Krume Kepeski, Krum Tosev, Blagoja Korubin, Trajko Stamatoski, Bozidar Vidoeski are part of the greats of that language-making generation that gave us grammars, dictionaries, orthographies and dialect atlases. That generation founded our most important institutions – the Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski”, the National and University Library “St. Kliment Ohridski”, the Writers’ Association of Macedonia, the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Institute of Macedonian Language “Krste Petkov Misirkov”, the institutes for Macedonian literature and for Old Slavic literacy and many, many others.
That generation spread the Macedonian language across the meridians, opening Macedonian language departments at some of the most famous European and world universities. Through the International Seminar on Macedonian Language, Literature and Culture, they created a wide circle of trust among Macedonian and foreign Slavists, who invested their lives in the study and promotion of the truth about the Macedonian language. Through events such as the Struga Poetry Evenings, the greats of the Macedonian word paved the path for the Macedonian literature to the European and world anthologies.
Esteemed Attendees,
Each of us in this ceremonial hall grew up with the freedom to speak and create in the Macedonian language, a freedom that our ancestors could only dream of.
However, today, 80 years after the codification, the Macedonian language is once again facing challenges.
The first challenge is the ghosts of anachronistic Balkan nationalisms, which have not yet come to terms with the reality of the Macedonian identity. Over the past thirty years, there have been attempts to erase the Macedonian language, ranging from its blatant denial, through euphemistic renaming, to tautological explanations in footnotes in official documents of some international organizations.
The 2019 Charter for the Macedonian Language of the Assembly of MANU, the Memorandum of MANU, MOC-OA and UKIM of 2020, and the petitions signed by numerous Macedonian and foreign intellectuals, are examples of how the truth about the Macedonian language should be defended with arguments.
In addition to the scientific one, we should also invoke the argument of creativity. The poems of Aco Sopov, the novels of Slavko Janevski, the metaphors of Radovan Pavlovski, the plays of Goran Stefanovski, the translations of Dragi Mihajlovski, are part of the testimonies that our authors do not stutter in some newly constructed idiom, but created by using a mature language with a long temporal and spatial continuity.
But much more dangerous than external denial is the internal neglect of the language, which is taking on the dimensions of an unstoppable epidemic. We are witnesses to the reduction of the importance of the official use of the Macedonian language in the country. Petre M. Andreevski was right when he warned that “the language can be endangered by its speakers”, emphasizing that regardless of whether this is done out of ignorance or negligence, “betrayal of the language is betrayal of both one’s own parents and one’s own children”.
And many of our children are leaving abroad. Due to the mass emigration of young people, currently the Macedonian language has more speakers in the diaspora than in the homeland.
According to UNESCO, about 3,000 languages are facing the danger of disappearing by the end of this century, which means that one language could become extinct in every two weeks. With each language, the unique, authentic worldview of its speakers also disappears. We must not allow such a fate to befall the Macedonian language and we must do everything to protect it.
We can do this in at least three ways.
First, with consistent respect of the constitutional norm, according to which official language is the Macedonian language and its Cyrillic script, and with strict implementation of the Law on the Use of the Macedonian Language. We must insist on the primacy of the Macedonian language in official and state communication at all levels from local self-government to the Government and Parliament and other institutions, as well as in education. The Macedonian language is part of our social contract and a common communication code between Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Roma, Serbs, Vlachs, Bosniaks and others.
Second, with the support of educational, academic and scientific institutions. Investing in the Macedonian language and literature is not a waste of resources, but building our unique complete homeland, as part of the European cultural and educational space.
Third, with digitalization. Only through the digitalization of the Macedonian creativity, through training the language models on artificial intelligence will we succeed in transferring the Macedonian language into the digital era so that it is accessible to the Macedonian diaspora and future generations. ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek already “speak” Macedonian. Last year, “Bookie” was also launched – a digital platform for transcription in the Macedonian language, based on artificial intelligence. Each of us can contribute to this new phase in the development of the Macedonian language.
Dear Friends,
The Macedonian language legitimizes the Macedonian identity. The Macedonian language is our natural and fundamental human right and guardian of our collective memory. With such a thought, in one of his texts written exactly 25 years ago, Petre M. Andreevski said that “by defending the language, we are defending our life and our common name, our common homeland. We are defending, in fact, the most sublime – our independence, our freedom, and together with them, our future.”
But, we must not forget the history of the Macedonian language, which is far longer than 80 years. I will refer to the famous Slavist and Macedonianist Reginald de Bray, who wrote in his “Guide to the Slavonic Languages” in 1951: “What an irony of history, the people whose ancestors gave the Slavs the first literary language were the last to have their language recognized as a separate Slavic language, distinct from the neighboring Bulgarian and Serbian”.
Let me remind you that this year marks 145 years since the publication of the Dictionary of Three Languages, 150 years since the “Slogica Recovska”, i.e. the first published grammar in the Macedonian language by Gjorgjija Pulevski, 135 years since the defense of the first doctorate in the Macedonian language at the University of Dorpat in Estonia by Leonhard Gotthilf Masing, as well as 100 years since the printing of the “Alphabet” in Athens, at the request of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the UN!
I wonder and ask you: are these events and dates not enough to declare 2025 the year of the Macedonian language?
Thank you.
