Group Slavic (with Russian, Polish etc.), Southern branch (with Bulgarian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian)
Geography Spoken by 2 million people in Macedonia, the former Yugoslav republic. There are three dialectal groups - western, eastern, northern. 
History Macedonian became a separate language since the 18th century, being a dialect of Bulgarian before that, in the Middle Ages. Today the number of differences between Bulgarian and Macedonian continues to grow, though Bulgarian still remains its closest relative. 
Phonetics Besides five vowels of Macedonian: a, e, i, o, u, the sound r can also be syllabic. All the consonants, except [x], have their unvoiced variants. Most of consonants are hard, j, k', g', n', l' are soft. The Common Slavic nasal [o] became a here, while the reduced vowels turn into [o] and [e] (unlike in Bulgarian).
Nominal Morphology The case inflections have been totally lost, the syntactic constructions are analytical. The postpositive article marks both the definite nouns and the distance between the speaker and the thing: knigata 'the book', knigava 'this book', knigana 'that book'. 
Verbal Morphology A complicated system of modal and tense forms of the verb is characteritic for Macedonian. Besides the aorist and the imperfect, the perfect forms are used with the verb ima 'to have'. The only participle an act for both active and passive meanings.
Writing Cyrillic alphabet
Close Contacts Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Albanian
Sample Drevnata indoevropska padežna promena se projavuvala kako zaokružen i celosen sistem. Od formalna gledna točka, padežnata promena zemala predvid tri gramatički roda - maški, ženski i sreden, tri broja - ednina, množina i dvoina, kako i osum padeži.

The ancient Indo-European case declension existed as a tiny and integral system. From the formal point of view, the case declension obviously had three genders - masculine, feminine and neuter, tri numbers - singular, plural and dual, and also eight cases.
Picture Church in Macedonia
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