Words R Us
- Upper Macedonian (mkd)

Macedonian is spoken as a first language by around 1.6 million people. It serves as the official language of North Macedonia. Most speakers can be found in the country and its diaspora, with a smaller number of speakers throughout the transnational region of Macedonia. Macedonian is also a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Serbia and it is spoken by emigrant communities predominantly in Australia, Canada and the United States.

Macedonian has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Bulgarian and varieties of Serbo-Croatian. The international consensus outside of Bulgaria is that Macedonian is an autonomous language. It is written using an adapted 31-letter version of the Cyrillic script with six original letters. Macedonian syntax is of the subject-verb-object (SVO) type and has flexible word order.

As a language, Macedonian is relatively young. The official Macedonian alphabet was codified on 5 May 1945. During the standardization process, there was deliberate care taken to try to purify the lexicon of the language. Words that were associated with the Serbian or Bulgarian standard languages, which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region, were rejected in favor of words from native dialects and archaisms. This is not to say that there are no words associated with the Serbian, Bulgarian, or even Russian standard languages in the language, but rather that they were discouraged on a principle of "seeking native material first."

The Macedonian people are predominantly Eastern Orthodox with a very small Evangelical Christian community. The Evangelical community is growing however, well above the world-side rate. Islam makes up 40% of the population, primarily among other people groups living in Upper Macedonia. Relatively few other religions are represented.

Sources: Wikipedia
The Joshua Project