This article discusses the

phonological Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

system of

Standard Macedonian Standard Macedonian or literary Macedonian ( or македонски литературен јазик, ''makedonski literaturen jazik'') is the standard variety of the Macedonian language and the official language of North Macedonia used in wri ...

(unless otherwise noted) based on the Prilep-Bitola

dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...

. For discussion of other dialects, see Macedonian dialects. Macedonian possesses five

vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

, one

semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are ''y ...

, three

liquid consonants Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly compressibility, incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usual ...

, three nasal stops, three pairs of

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

s, two pairs of

affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

s, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.

Vowels

Schwa

The schwa is phonemic in many dialects (varying in closeness to or ) but its use in the standard language is marginal. It is written with an apostrophe: . It can also be used for dialectal effect, e.g., , . When spelling aloud, each consonant is followed by the schwa. The individual letters of

acronyms An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...

are pronounced with the schwa in the same way: (). The lexicalized acronyms () and () (a brand of cigarettes), are among the few exceptions.

Vowel length

Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

is not phonemic. Vowels in stressed open syllables in disyllabic words with stress on the penult can be realized as long, e.g., ' Veles'. The sequence is often realized phonetically as ; e.g., .

Consonants

and are officially dorsal-palatal plosives, and some speakers pronounce them that way. They have various other pronunciations, depending on dialect. In some Northern Macedonian dialects they are alveolo-palatal affricates and (just like in

Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian ( / ), also known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually i ...

), while in the urban Prilep subdialect of the Prilep-Bitola dialect, they have merged into and , respectively. The velarised dental lateral (always written ) and the non-velarised alveolar lateral contrast in

minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate t ...

s such as and . Before , , and , only occurs and is then written instead of . The alveolar trill () is syllabic between two consonants, e.g., . The dental nasal () and velarised lateral () are also syllabic in certain foreign words, e.g., , . The velar fricative does not occur natively in the language. It has been introduced or retained in Standard Macedonian under the following circumstances: (1) new foreign words: , (2) toponyms: , (3) Church Slavonicisms: , (4) new literary words: , and (5) to disambiguate between potential homophones: vs. .

Phonological processes

At morpheme boundaries (represented in spelling) and at the end of a word (not represented in spelling), voicing opposition is neutralized.

Stress

The

word stress In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...

in Macedonian is

antepenultimate In linguistics, the ultima is the last syllable of a word, the penult is the next-to-last syllable, and the antepenult is third-from-last syllable. In a word of three syllables, the names of the syllables are antepenult-penult-ultima. Etymology Ul ...

, meaning it falls on the third from last

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

in words with three or more syllables, and on the first or only syllable in other words. This is sometimes disregarded when the word has entered the language more recently or from a foreign source. The following rules apply: *

Disyllabic A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

words are stressed on the second-to-last syllable, e.g., , , and . * Trisyllabic and polysyllabic words are stressed on the third-to-last syllable, e.g., , , and . Exceptions include: * Verbal adverbs, which are suffixed with : e.g., , . * Foreign

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

s: e.g., , , , , .

References

Bibliography

* *