Classification and related languages

The Macedonian language belongs to the eastern branch subfiliale Slavic South Slavic languages of the Indo-European family of languages, and therefore it is dropped from Ancient Macedonian. Its closest relative is Bulgarian, with one that has a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Prior to their codification in 1945, Macedonian dialects were for the most part classified as Bulgarian and some linguists consider them still as such, but this view is politically controversial. The language closer and closer is Serbian-Croatian (often known by the names of its standard languages​​, Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian and Croatian). All the South Slavic languages​​, including Macedonian, form a continuous dialect. The group of dialect Torlakian is intermediate between Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian-Croatian.

Along with its immediate Slavic neighbors, Macedonian also forms a constituent language of the Balkan Sprachbund, a group of languages ​​which share typological, grammatical and lexical based on geographical convergence, rather than genetic proximity. His other principal members are Romanian, Greek and Albanian, all of which belong to different genetic branches of the Indo-European family of languages ​​(Romanian is a Romance language, while the greek and albanian each include their own separate branches). The Macedonian and Bulgarian are sharply divergent from the rest of South Slavic languages​​, Serbian-Croatian and Slovenian, and in fact all other Slavic languages, in that they do not use noun cases (except for the vocative, and apart from some traces of once productive inflections still found scattered in the languages). They are also the only Slavic languages ​​with any definite article, but only three Macedonian: Article inspecificato, neighbor and distal. This latter feature is shared with Romanian, Albanian and the greek