Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) classified the Macedonian language and its dialects as part of Bulgarian dialectology. BAS and the Institute of Bulgarian Language, with financial assistance from the European Social Fund of the European Union, two days ago promoted internet audio-map of 30 authentic Bulgarian dialects, which also includes all dialects of Macedonia.
The audio-map, which was prepared by scientists from the Institute of Bulgarian Language at BAS, covers territories that are not within the state borders of Bulgaria, but “were Bulgarian territory in the past, such as parts of Macedonia, the Aegean region, a small part of Albania, southern parts of Serbia, Turkey and Romania,” writes Bulgarian daily “Monitor”.
Professor of Macedonian language Lyudmil Spasov, says that this is not the first case of BAS to include the Macedonian language as their dialect.
– This is resuscitation of Great Bulgaria thesis of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. BAS has repeatedly made dialectological maps that reflect San Stefano Bulgaria. After the recognition of the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria stopped this campaign and normal relations of science and culture were established. Unfortunately, these moves will surely break everything that was accomplished so far, the positive cooperation, and take us back to nationalist times – says Spasov.
Bulgarian audio dialectological map is part of the project “Integration of new knowledge and practices in computational linguistics” under which each user could enrich the map by adding audio document for a particular word or dialect phrase.
