DIE „MAKEDONISCHE SPRACHE“ AUS BULGARISCHER UND INTERNATIONALER SICHT: ASPEKTE ZU GESCHICHTE UND GEGENWART.

Makedonia was the name of a Balkan region since ancient times. The geographic region of Macedonia was always multilingual. Modern Slavic dialects in this region are part of the Bulgarian literary language, belonging to the south-east Slavic sub-group. The creation of an independent Bulgarian Church in 1870/1872 marked the end of Hellenism, which had attempted the creation of a language separate from Serbia and Bulgaria. On August 3rd 1944, "Macedonian" was declared as the official language of the Yugoslavian Socialist Republic of Macedonia. As a consequence of World War II, the Bulgarian language had more than one written codification, so one has to speak of a recodification in Macedonia and pluricentrism of Standard Bulgarian, a fact in Macedonia as well as the Aegean part of Greece, Banat and Ukraine. There is a list of Slavic researchers outside Bulgaria, who have published papers and books on this question, e.g. Gustav Weigand, Alfons Margulies and Norbert Reiter. Important research on the question of the so-called "Macedonian language" has also been conducted in Bulgaria and other European countries [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]