Ancient Macedonian: A case study

Abstract

The Macedonian dialect of Greek is known to us through limited written evidence of 100 common nouns and 250 proper nouns. Because of this fact, Macedonian Greek has been preserved only through evidence coming from scholars (lexicographers, grammarians, annotators), especially by scholars concerned with “linguistic curiosities” (what the Greeks called «γλῶσσαι»), i.e. dialectal words or grammatical forms, deviating from official dialects, especially from Attic Greek. The dialect has never been used as an official written language of the Macedonian State; it was a regional oral dialect. The Macedonian language was early replaced in written and oral use with Attic for political reasons. Hence, this Greek dialect has been continuously used in Macedonia from ancient years till today. This has always been known all over the world as the Macedonian language. It was only since 1944 that the Bulgaroserbian Slavic of FYROM started to be used with the pseudonymous name “Macedonian language”, a name which has created the confusion in nomenclature.