The Macedonian language is the object of controversy with its neighbours: Greeks challenge the legitimacy of its name, while Bulgarians deny its separateness from Bulgarian

Alphabet

The modern Macedonian alphabet was developed by linguists in the period after the Second World War, who based their alphabet on the phonetic alphabet of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, though a similar writing system was used by Krste Misirkov in the late 19th century. The Macedonian language had previously been written using the Early Cyrillic alphabet, or later using the Cyrillic alphabet with local adaptations from either the Serbian or Bulgarian alphabets.

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian alphabet, along with the IPA value for each letter:

Cyrillic IPA	А а /a/	Б б /b/	В в /v/	Г г /ɡ/	Д д /d/	Ѓ ѓ /ɟ/	Е е /ɛ/	Ж ж /ʒ/	З з /z/	Ѕ ѕ /dz/	И и /i/
Cyrillic IPA	Ј ј /j/	К к /k/	Л л /l/	Љ љ /lj/	М м /m/	Н н /n/	Њ њ /ɲ/	О о /ɔ/	П п /p/	Р р /r/	С с /s/
Cyrillic IPA	Т т /t/	Ќ ќ /c/	У у /u/	Ф ф /f/	Х х /x/	Ц ц /ts/	Ч ч /tʃ/	Џ џ /dʒ/	Ш ш /ʃ/

Specialized Letters

The Macedonian language contains a number of specialized and unique phonemes. The committees charged with drafting the Macedonian alphabet decided on a phonetic alphabet, with one letter representing each phoneme. In his 1903 book “On Macedonian Matters“, Krste Misirkov argued for the standarization of the Macedonian language (based on the central dialects), and for a phonetic orthography. Misirkov’s book is considered one of the most important foundational works of the modern Macedonian language and nation.

Macedonian has two unique phonemes (Ѓ and Ќ).

Unique Letters

Ѓ and Ќ

In “On Macedonian Matters“, Misirkov used the combinations Г’ and К’ to represent the phonemes /ɟ/ and /c/, which are unique to Macedonian among the local languages. Marko Cepenkov used ГЬ and КЬ. Eventually, Ѓ and Ќ were adopted for the Macedonian alphabet.

Despite their forms, Ѓ and Ќ are ordered not after Г and К, but after Д and Т respectively, based on phonetic similarity. This corresponds to the alphabet positions of Serbian/Croatian Ђ/Đ and Ћ/Ć respectively. These letters often correspond to Macedonian Ѓ and Ќ in cognates (for example, Macedonian “шеќер” (šeḱer, sugar) is analogous to Serbian/Croatian “шећер/šećer”), but they are phonetically different.

Ѕ

The Cyrillic letter Ѕ (IPA value /dz/) is based on Dzělo, the eighth letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet. Although a homoglyph to the Latin alphabet letter S, the two letters are not directly related. Both the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian alphabet also had a letter Ѕ, although the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was replaced with a Latin alphabet in the 1860s, and the letter Ѕ was abolished in Russian in the early 1700s.

It should be noted that while Ѕ is generally transcribed as dz, it is a distinct phoneme and is not analogous to ДЗ, which is also used in Macedonian orthography. Ѕ is sometimes described as soft-dz.

Letters Adopted from Serbian Cyrillic

Ј

Prior to standardization, the IPA phoneme /j/ (represented by Ј in the modern Macedonian alphabet) was represented variously as:

• Й/й (as in Bulgarian and Russian orthographies);
• І/і (used by Misirkov in On Macedonian Matters and Marko Cepenkov); or
• Ј/ј (as in Serbian orthography)

Eventually the Ј was selected to represent /j/.

Љ and Њ

The letters Љ and Њ (/ʎ/ and /ɲ/) were adopted from the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Misirkov used Л’ and Н’ in On Macedonian Matters. Some earlier texts used ЛЬ and НЬ.

Џ

The letter Џ (representing the phoneme /dʒ/) was adopted from the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Misirkov used the digraph ДЖ, where Џ is used today. The letter Џ was introduced to Serbian in the 17th century from the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet.

Accented Letters

The accented letters È, Ѝ and Ô are not regarded as separate letters, nor are they accented letters (as in French, for example). Rather, they are the standard letters Е, И and О topped with an accent when they stand in words that have homographs, so as to differentiate between them (for example, “сè се фаќа” - se se fakja, “all may be touched”).