The Eastern South Slavic dialects form the eastern subgroup of the South Slavic languages. They are spoken mostly in Bulgaria and North Macedonia, and adjacent areas in the neighbouring countries. They form the Macedo-Bulgarian or the so-called Balkan Slavic linguistic area, which encompasses the southeastern part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic.
Linguistic features Languages and dialects
Eastern South Slavic dialects share a number of characteristics that set them apart from the other branch of the South Slavic languages, the Western South Slavic languages. The Eastern South Slavic group consists of Bulgarian and Macedonian, and according to some authors encompasses the southeastern dialect of Serbian, the so-called Prizren-Timok dialect.Victor Friedman, "The Typology of Balkan Evidentiality and Areal Linguistics"; Olga Mieska Tomic, Aida Martinovic-Zic as ed. Balkan Syntax and Semantics; vol. 67 от Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today Series; John Benjamins Publishing, 2004; ; p. 123. The last is part of the broader transitional Torlakian dialectal area. The Balkan Slavic area is also part of the Balkan Sprachbund. The external boundaries of the Balkan Slavic/Eastern South Slavic area can be defined with the help of some linguistic structural features. The most important of them include: the loss of the infinitive and case declension, and the use of enclitic definite articles.Jouko Lindstedt, "Conflicting Nationalist Discourses in the Balkan Slavic Language Area" in The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders with editors: Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi and Catherine Gibson; Palgrave Macmillan; 2016; ; pp. 429–447. In the Balkan Slavic languages, clitic doubling also occurs, which is a characteristic feature of all the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund.Olga Miseska Tomic, "Variation in Clitic-doubling in South Slavic" in Article in Syntax and Semantics 36: 443–468; January 2008; . The grammar of Balkan Slavic looks like a hybrid of "Slavic" and "Romance" grammars with some Albanian additions.Jouko Lindstedt, "Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance: from congruence to convergence" in Besters-Dilger, Juliane & al. (eds.). 2014. Congruence in Contact-induced Language Change. Berlin – Boston: De Gruyter. ; pp. 168–183. The Serbo-Croatian vocabulary in both Macedonian and Serbian-Torlakian is very similar, stemming from the border changes of 1878, 1913, and 1918, when these areas came under direct Serbian linguistic influence.
Areal The external and internal boundaries of the linguistic sub-group between the transitional Torlakian dialect and Serbian and between Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are not clearly defined. For example, standard Serbian, which is based on its Western (Eastern Herzegovinian dialect), is very different from its Eastern (Prizren-Timok dialect), especially in its position in the Balkan Sprachbund.Motoki Nomachi, “East” and “West” as Seen in the Structure of Serbian: Language Contact and Its Consequences; p. 34. in Slavic Eurasian Studies edited by Ljudmila Popović and Motoki Nomachi; 2015, No.28. During the 19th century, the Balkan Slavic dialects were often described as forming the Bulgarian language.Friedman V A (2006), Balkans as a Linguistic Area. In: Keith Brown, (Editor-in Chief) Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, Second Edition, volume 1, pp. 657–672. Oxford: Elsevier. At the time, the areas east of Niš were considered under direct Bulgarian ethnolinguistic influence and in the middle of the 19th century, that motivated the Serb linguistic reformer Vuk Karadžić to use the Eastern Herzegovina dialects for his standardisation of Serbian.Drezov, Kyril (1999). "Macedonian identity: An overview of the major claims". In Pettifer, James (ed.). The New Macedonian Question. MacMillan Press. p. 53. . Older Serbian scholars believed that the Yat border divides the Serbian and Bulgarian languages.Roland Sussex, Paul Cubberley, The Slavic Languages, Cambridge Language Surveys, Cambridge University Press, 2006; , p. 510. However, modern Serbian linguists such as Pavle Ivić have accepted that the main isoglosses bundle dividing Eastern and Western South Slavic runs from the mouth of the Timok river alongside Osogovo mountain and Sar Mountain.Ivic, Pavle, Balkan Slavic Migrations in the Light of South Slavic Dialectology in Aspects of the Balkans. Continuity and change with H. Birnbaum and S. Vryonis (eds.) Walter de Gruyter, 2018; , pp. 66–86. In Bulgaria this isogloss is considered the eastern most border of the broader set of transitional Torlakian dialects.
In turn, Bulgarian linguists prior to World War II classified the Torlakian dialects or, in other words, all of Balkan Slavic as Bulgarian on the basis of their structural features, e.g., lack of case inflection, existence of a postpositive definite article and renarrative mood, use of clitics, preservation of final l, etc.Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, Catherine Gibson as ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders, Springer, 2016; , p. 434. Individual researchers, such as Krste Misirkov, in one of his Bulgarian nationalist periods, and Benyo Tsonev have pushed the linguistic border even further west to include the Kosovo-Resava dialects or, in other words, all Serbian dialects having analytical features. Both countries currently accept the state border prior to 1919 to also be the boundary between the two languages.
Slavic speakers in Macedonia referred to their own language as balgàrtzki, bùgarski or bugàrski; i.e. Bulgarian. However, Bulgarian was standardized at the end of the 19th century on the basis of its eastern Central Balkan dialect, while Macedonian was standardized in the middle of the 20th century using its west-central Prilep-Bitola dialect. Although some researchers still describe the standard Macedonian and Bulgarian languages as varieties of a pluricentric language, they have very different and remote dialectal bases.
According to Chambers and Trudgill, the question whether Bulgarian and Macedonian are distinct languages or dialects of a single language cannot be resolved on a purely linguistic basis, but should rather take into account sociolinguistic criteria, i.e., ethnic and linguistic identity. As for the Slavic dialects of Greece, Trudgill classifies the dialects in the east Greek Macedonia as part of the Bulgarian language area and the rest as Macedonian dialects.Trudgill P., 2000, "Greece and European Turkey: From Religious to Linguistic Identity". In: Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe, Oxford : Oxford University Press, p.259. Jouko Lindstedt opines that the dividing line between Macedonian and Bulgarian is defined by the linguistic identity of the speakers, i.e., the state border; but has suggested the reflex of the back yer as a potential boundary if the application of purely linguistic criteria were possible.Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, Catherine Gibson as ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders, Springer, 2016; , p. 436. According to Riki van Boeschoten, the dialects in eastern Greek Macedonia (around Serres and Drama) are closest to Bulgarian, those in western Greek Macedonia (around Florina and Kastoria) are closest to Macedonian, while those in the centre (Edessa and Salonica) are intermediate between the two.Boeschoten, Riki van (1993): Minority Languages in Northern Greece. Study Visit to Florina, Aridea, (Report to the European Commission, Brussels), p. 13 "The Western dialect is used in Florina and Kastoria and is closest to the language used north of the border, the Eastern dialect is used in the areas of Serres and Drama and is closest to Bulgarian, the Central dialect is used in the area between Edessa and Salonica and forms an intermediate dialect"
History Some of the phenomena that distinguish western and eastern subgroups of the South Slavic people and languages can be explained by two separate migratory waves of different Slavic tribal groups of the future South Slavs via two routes: the west and east of the Carpathian Mountains.The Slavic Languages, Roland Sussex, Paul Cubberley, Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2006, , p. 42. The western Balkans was settled with Sclaveni, the eastern with Antes.Hupchick, Dennis P. The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. The early habitat of the Slavic tribes, that are said to have moved to Bulgaria, was described as being in present Ukraine and Belarus. The mythical homeland of the Serbs and Croats lies in the area of present day Bohemia, in the present-day Czech Republic and in Lesser Poland. In this way, the Balkans were settled by different groups of Slavs from different dialect areas. This is evidenced by some isoglosses of ancient origin, dividing the western and eastern parts of the South Slavic range.
The extinct Old Church Slavonic, which survives in a relatively small body of manuscripts, most of them written in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century, is also classified as Eastern South Slavic. The language has an Eastern South Slavic basis with small admixture of Western Slavic features, inherited during the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to Great Moravia during the 9th century.Lunt, Horace G. (2001). Old Church Slavonic Grammar (7th ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; p.1; . New Church Slavonic represents a later stage of the Old Church Slavonic, and is its continuation through the liturgical tradition introduced by its precursor. Ivo Banac maintains that during the Middle Ages, Torlakian and Eastern Herzegovinian dialects were Eastern South Slavic, but since the 12th century, the Shtokavian dialects, including Eastern Herzegovinian, began to separate themselves from the other neighboring Eastern dialects, among them Torlakian.Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Cornell University Press, 1988, , p. 47.
The specific contact mechanism in the Balkan Sprachbund, based on the high number of second Balkan language speakers there, is among the key factors that reduced the number of Slavic morphological categories in that linguistic area.Wahlström, Max. 2015. The loss of case inflection in Bulgarian and Macedonian (Slavica Helsingiensia 47); University of Helsinki, . The Primary Chronicle, written ca. 1100, claims that then the Vlachs attacked the Slavs on the Danube and settled among them. Nearly at the same time are dated the first historical records about the emerging Albanians, as living in the area to the west of the Lake Ohrid. There are references in some Byzantine documents from that period to "Bulgaro-Albano-Vlachs" and even to "Serbo-Albano-Bulgaro-Vlachs".John Van Antwerp Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest, University of Michigan Press, 1994, , p. 355. As a consequence, case inflection, and some other characteristics of Slavic languages, were lost in Eastern South Slavic area, approximately between the 11th–16th centuries. Migratory waves were particularly strong in the 16th–19th century, bringing about large-scale linguistic and ethnic changes on the Central and Eastern Balkan South Slavic area. They reduced the number of Slavic-speakers and led to the additional settlement of Albanian and Vlach-speakers there.
Separation between Macedonian and Bulgarian
The rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire began to degrade its specific social system, and especially the so-called Rum millet, through constant identification of the religious creed with ethnicity. The national awakening of each ethnic group was complex and most of the groups interacted with each other.