The concept of ‘Macedonian Slavic’ is confusing only for those
who want it to be. Macedonian Slavic is to such an extent a
reality that there existed in the nineteenth century a Macedonian
literary language, the language of a quite limited scholarly
literature but of a voluminous popular literature; and one is not
dealing here with documents of folklore such as can be found
anywhere: the Macedonian lyric poem, much appreciated in
Serbia and in Bulgaria, represents and authentic literary genre, of
real value. This literary language, based on dialects which
naturally differ among themselves, had not had the time for
unification. But its centers were Skopje, Tetovo, Ohrid, Bitola
(Manastir), Voden, etc.
