Where Macedonian is spoken
Macedonian is spoken in 5 countries: North Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and 1 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| North Macedonia | 67% | 1,430,865 |
| Greece | 1.6% | 167,378 |
| Albania | 0.5% | 14,603 |
| Bulgaria | Not given | Not given |
| Serbia | Not given | Not given |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Macedonian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Macedonian.
How many people speak Macedonian?
Wikidata gives about 2 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Macedonian sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Macedonian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Balto-Slavic
- Slavic
- South Slavic
- Eastern South Slavic
- Macedo-Bulgarian
- Macedonian
Related languages
Other languages in the Macedo-Bulgarian group:
- Bulgarian (9 million speakers)
More about Macedonian
- Read about Macedonian on Wikipedia
- Indo-European languages map
- Languages spoken in North Macedonia
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 mkd, Glottolog mace1250. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Macedonian
Where is Macedonian spoken?
Macedonian is spoken in North Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and 1 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 67% of the population of North Macedonia, which is about 1,430,865 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Macedonian?
Wikidata gives about 2 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.
Which language family is Macedonian in?
Glottolog places Macedonian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, South Slavic, Eastern South Slavic and Macedo-Bulgarian.