Macedonian alphabet

The orthography of the Macedonian language includes an alphabet consisting of 31 letters (Macedonian: Македонска азбука, romanized: Makedonska azbuka), which is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script, as well as language-specific conventions of spelling and punctuation.

The Macedonian alphabet was standardized in 1945 by a commission formed in Yugoslav Macedonia after the Partisans took power at the end of World War II. The alphabet used the same phonemic principles employed by Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864) and Krste Misirkov (1874–1926).

Before standardization, the language had been written in a variety of different versions of Cyrillic by different writers, influenced by Early Cyrillic, Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian orthography.

Origins:

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

In addition to the standard sounds of the letters Ѓ and Ќ above, in some dialects these letters represent /dʑ/ and /tɕ/, respectively.

The above table contains the printed form of the Macedonian alphabet; the cursive script is significantly different, and is illustrated below in lower and upper case (letter order and layout below corresponds to table above).

Macedonian has a number of phonemes not found in neighboring languages. The committees charged with drafting the Macedonian alphabet decided on phonemic principle with a one-to-one match between letters and distinctive sounds.