Macedonian phonology

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: ’рж, за’ржи, В’чков, К’чев, К’шање, С’лп. It can also be used for dialectal effect, e.g., к’смет, с’нце. When spelling aloud, each consonant is followed by the schwa. The individual letters of acronyms are pronounced with the schwa in the same way: МПЦ (). The lexicalized acronyms СССР () and МТ () (a brand of cigarettes), are among the few exceptions.

Vowel length

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

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), 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 pairs such as бела and беља . Before , , and , only occurs and is then written instead of .

The alveolar trill () is syllabic between two consonants, e.g., прст . The dental nasal () and velarised lateral () are also syllabic in certain foreign words, e.g., њутн , Попокатепетл .

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: хотел , (2) toponyms: Охрид , (3) Church Slavonicisms: дух , (4) new literary words: доход , 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 Macedonian is antepenultimate, meaning it falls on the third from last syllable 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 words are stressed on the second-to-last syllable, e.g., дете , мајка , and .
• Trisyllabic and polysyllabic words are stressed on the third-to-last syllable, e.g., планина , планината , and планинарите .

Exceptions include:

• Verbal adverbs, which are suffixed with : e.g., викајќи , одејќи .
• Foreign loanwords: e.g., клише , генеза , литература , Александар , .

References

Bibliography