Македонский алфавит: история и особенности

Writing system of the Macedonian language

The orthography of the Macedonian language includes an alphabet consisting of 31 letters , which is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script, as well as language specific conventions of spelling and punctuation. The Macedonian alphabet was standardized in 1945 by a committee formed in Yugoslav Macedonia after the Partisans took power at the end of World War II. 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 above table contains the printed form of the Macedonian 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).

Macedonian has a number of phonemes not found in neighbouring languages. The committees charged with drafting the Macedonian alphabet decided on phonemic principle with a one to one match between letters and distinctive sounds.

In "On Macedonian Matters", Misirkov used the combinations Г' and К' to represent the phonemes and , which are unique to Macedonian among South Slavic languages. In his magazine "Vardar", Misirkov used the letters Ѓ and Ќ, as did Dimitar Mirčev in his book. Eventually, Ѓ and Ќ were adopted for the Macedonian 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 Parteniy 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 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.

The Cyrillic letter Dze (S s), representing the sound , 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. Both the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian alphabet also had a letter Ѕ, although Romanian Cyrillic was replaced with a Latin alphabet in the 1860s, and the letter Ѕ was abolished in Russian in the early 18th century. 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 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 Џ (representing the phoneme ) was likely adopted from the Serbian alphabet and used by Gjorgjija Pulevski in four of his works, as well as by the Secret Macedonian Committee and Dimitar Mirčev. Misirkov used the digraph ДЖ. The letter Џ is used today.

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").

At the end of WWII this territory was incorporation into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, the Yugoslav authorities recognized a distinct Macedonian ethnic identity and language. The Anti Fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM, effectively the Macedonian provisional government) formed a committee to standardize Macedonian and its alphabet. ASNOM rejected the first committee's recommendations, and formed a second committee, whose recommendations were accepted. The (second) committees' recommendations were strongly influenced by the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (28 of the Macedonian alphabet's 31 letters are common to both Macedonian and Serbian, the letters unique to Macedonian being Ѓ, Ѕ, and Ќ), and by the works of Krste Misirkov.

The second language commission worked in March 1945. It includes Vojislav Ilic, Vasil Iloski, Blaze Koneski, Venko Markovski, Mirko Pavlovski and Krum Toshev. Radovan Zagovic and Milovan Djilas from Belgrade intervened in the commission's work. Previously, the activists of the YCP asked for support from the USSR and the BCP on the occasion of the new convened commission, whose task was predetermined to adopt a new alphabet based on the Serbian alphabet. The second commission borrowed almost entirely the Serbian.