Distinguishing Bulgarian and Macedonian

Bulgarian (MARC “bul”) and Macedonian (“mac”) are closely related languages. Together, they comprise the eastern group of the South Slavic languages, and they share a number of innovations that separate them from the rest of the Slavic languages and lend structural similarity to other languages of the Balkans such as Greek, Romanian, and Albanian: the weakening or loss of the infinitive and case marking in nouns, a postposed definite article, grammatical marking of evidentiality, etc. For the cataloger, merely distinguishing between Bulgarian and Macedonian should not be a difficult task; one can refer to both linguistic and extra-linguistic evidence.

Orthographic & Linguistic Distinctions

The most obvious means of differentiating between Bulgarian and Macedonian are the two languages’ distinct orthographic systems. Bulgarian has a unique schwa-like vowel, written with the character that Russian uses as a “hard sign,” Ъ. Bulgarian marks vowels preceded by /j/ or a palatalized consonant similarly to Russian as well, by using separate “soft” vowel letters; contemporary Macedonian, on the other hand, which uses an alphabet based on that of Serbian, employs a Ј together with basic vowel letters. Thus, sounds that would be written in Bulgarian as Й, Ю, Я would appear in Macedonian as Ј, ЈУ, ЈА. Additionally, Macedonian has a number of distinct consonantal letters: Љ, Њ, Ѕ, Џ, Ќ, Ѓ, and Bulgarian has Щ. Altogether, the following letters can serve to differentiate between the two languages:

Bulgarian: Й й, Щ щ, Ъ ъ, Ь ь, Ю ю, Я я

Macedonian: Ѓ ѓ, Ѕ ѕ, Ј ј, Љ љ, Њ њ, Ќ ќ, Џ џ

The two languages also look quite different when romanized according to ALA-LC standards. The romanization table for Bulgarian is based on that of Russian, and it makes use of digraphs, like Sh for Cyrillic Ш, and ligatures, like  I︠A︡ for Я. The Macedonian table is, again, based on the Serbian Latin alphabet, and it relies more heavily on diacritics, such as Š for Ш.

A comparison of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the two languages provides a nice illustration of how starkly distinct the two languages are visually to a reader already familiar with Cyrillic:

Bulgarian

Всеки човек има право на свобода на мисълта, съвестта и религията; това право включва правото да смени религията или убежденията си, както и свободата да изповядва религията или убежденията си, индивидуално или колективно, публично или частно, чрез обучение, обреди, богослужение и ритуали.

Macedonian

Секој има право на слобода на мислата, совеста и религија. Ова право ја вклучува и слободата – човекот да ја промени својата религија или убедување, како и слободата – човекот, индивидуално или во заедница со други луѓе, приватно или јавно, да ја манифестира својата религија или убедување преку подучување, практикување, одржување служби или обреди.

It bears noting that, in addition to these surface-level orthographic distinctions (which, indeed, are based in part on underlying phonological innovations), there are meaningful morphological and syntactic differences between the two languages as well. Though the relevant details are beyond the scope of this chapter, Macedonian has a more richly developed definite article system, and the verbal systems in particular of both languages mark certain phenomena, such as conditionals, complex tenses, and evidentiality, in meaningfully different ways. Additionally—while both languages feature numerous lexical borrowings from major European languages, Turkish, and other Balkan languages—Bulgarian has more words from Russian and Church Slavic, while Macedonian’s lexicon is much more influenced by Serbian.

Geography & Publication Information

Nearly always, Cyrillic books published in North Macedonia are in Macedonian, and those from Bulgaria are in Bulgarian. The rare exceptions to this, of course, include collections of texts in multiple languages, such as conferences and scholarly collaborations between the two countries, and publications issued by national minority presses, which usually make their provenance exceedingly clear. In general, resources can typically be identified by some common places of publication:

България: София, Пловдив, Велико Търново (Bulgaria: Sofia, Plovdiv, Veliko Tŭrnovo)

Северна Македонија: Скопје, Охрид, Битола (North Macedonia: Skopje, Ohrid, Bitola)

Conclusion

Macedonian and Bulgarian are closely related and, indeed, they constitute a dialect continuum whereby the dialects of eastern North Macedonia gradually transition into those of western Bulgaria. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the spoken languages and, in fact, it is a consequence of the historical contexts of their standardization and the dialectal norms on which they were based (Bulgarian on its eastern dialects, and Macedonian on its western ones) that the two languages in their contemporary literary forms are not more similar or even unified. Nationalistic tendencies in prominent circles within Bulgaria have led to the dismissal of Macedonian as “merely a dialect” of Bulgarian, but this view is not generally accepted by scholars outside of Bulgaria. As such, it must be emphasized that the two linguistic systems as they stand today bear important differences and merit careful attention from a cataloger of Slavic-language materials.

Submitted by Cammeron Girvin, August 24, 2023