Macedonian language tutorial
The Macedonian language belongs to the Slavic group of languages. It is closely related to Serbian and Bulgarian, but it is not a dialect of neither one of them, but a language on its own.
The first Slavic language used for literary purposes was Old Church Slavonic, written in the Cyrillic alphabet devised by the Macedonian missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century. As individual alphabets were later developed for the various Slavic languages, the choice was made entirely by religion. Orthodox Macedonians adopted the Cyrillic alphabet, which you can see in the text above.
It was in 1950 that the then professor of London University, Reginald de Bray stated unequivocally in his book “Guide to the Slavonic Languages”, that – “By an irony of history the people who ancestors gave to the Slavs their first literary language, were the last to have their modern language recognized as a separate Slavonic language, distinct from the neighboring Serbian and Bulgarian.” Mr. de Bray also put forward in his chapter on “Old Slavonic” that – “The first writings in Old Slavonic are now generally considered by philosophers to have been in the language of the Slavs of Macedonia of the second half of the ninth century”.