Eastern South Slavic
The external boundaries of the Balkan Slavic/Eastern South Slavic area can be defined with the help of some linguistic structural features.
[10] The Serbo-Croatian vocabulary in both Macedonian and Serbian-Torlakian is very similar, stemming from the border changes of 1878, 1913, and 1918, when these areas came under direct Serbian linguistic influence.
The external and internal boundaries of the linguistic sub-group between the transitional Torlakian dialect and Serbian and between Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are not clearly defined.
[12] At the time, the areas east of Niš were considered under direct Bulgarian ethnolinguistic influence and in the middle of the 19th century, that motivated the Serb linguistic reformer Vuk Karadžić to use the Eastern Herzegovina dialects for his standardisation of Serbian.
In turn, Bulgarian linguists prior to World War II classified the Torlakian dialects or, in other words, all of Balkan Slavic as Bulgarian on the basis of their structural features, e.g., lack of case inflection, existence of a postpositive definite article and renarrative mood, use of clitics, preservation of final l, etc.
The mythical homeland of the Serbs and Croats lies in the area of present day Bohemia, in the present-day Czech Republic and in Lesser Poland.
This is evidenced by some isoglosses of ancient origin, dividing the western and eastern parts of the South Slavic range.
The extinct Old Church Slavonic, which survives in a relatively small body of manuscripts, most of them written in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century, is also classified as Eastern South Slavic.
Nearly at the same time are dated the first historical records about the emerging Albanians, as living in the area to the west of the Lake Ohrid.
Migratory waves were particularly strong in the 16th–19th century, bringing about large-scale linguistic and ethnic changes on the Central and Eastern Balkan South Slavic area.
The rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire began to degrade its specific social system, and especially the so-called Rum millet, through constant identification of the religious creed with ethnicity.
[39] The national elites active in this movement used mainly ethnolinguistic principles to differentiation between "Slavic-Bulgarian" and "Greek" groups.
It was not a surprise, because the most significant part of the new Bulgarian intelligentsia came from the towns of the Eastern Sub-Balkan valley in Central Bulgaria.
and instead suggested that authors themselves use dialectal features in their work, thus becoming role models and allowing the natural development of a literary language.
[51] Macedono-Bulgarian writers and organizations who continued to seek greater representation of Macedonian dialects in the Bulgarian standard were deemed separatists.
[60] In the Interwar period, the territory of today's North Macedonia became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Bulgarian was banned for use and the local vernacular fell under heavy influence from the official Serbo-Croatian language.
During the World wars Bulgaria's short annexations over Macedonia saw two attempts to bring the Macedonian dialects back towards Bulgarian.
This political situation stimulated the necessity of a separate Macedonian language and led gradually to its codification after the Second World War.
Thus, originally Old Bulgarian higher-style lexis such as безплътен (incorporeal), въздържание (temperance), изобретател (inventor), изтребление (annihilation), кръвопролитие (bloodshed), пространство (space), развращавам (debauch), създание (creature), съгражданин (fellow citizen), тщеславие (vainglory), художник (painter), was re-borrowed in the 1800s from Church Slavonic and Russian, where it had been adopted in the Early Middle Ages.
ѹрокъ) readopted in the meaning of "lesson" rather than "condition"/"proviso", yet many, many others that ended up being Russian or Church Slavonic new developments on the basis of Old Bulgarian roots, suffixes, prefixes, etc.
