Macedonia - Languages

Macedonian is a southern Slavic tongue that was not officially recognized until 1944, and is the primary language of 70% of the population. Bulgarians claim it is merely a dialect of their own language. As in Bulgarian, there are virtually no declensions and the definite article is suffixed. Also as in Bulgarian—and unlike any other Slavic language—an indefinite article exists as a separate word. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but with two special characters— r and k. Minority languages are officially recognized at the local level. Albanian is spoken by about 21% of the population, Turkish by about 3% Serbo-Croatian by 3% and various other languages by 3%.