As the dispute between Macedonia and Bulgaria continues to heat up, the Bulgarian BANU Academy is promoting a book that labels the Macedonian language as a Western dialect of the Bulgarian language.

The book, titled “On the official language of the Republic of North Macedonia”, was written by 20 Bulgarian academics and it supports the official Bulgarian policy that there is no such thing as an independent Macedonian language. It contains maps of the territory of San Stefano Bulgaria, or Greater Bulgaria, the short-lived state created in 1878 which included the contemporary Republic of Macedonia and parts of modern day Greece, Serbia and Turkey. The map outlines the dialects of these lands, which it labels as Bulgarian dialects.

The language spoken by the people in what is today the “Republic of North Macedonia” is a regional norm of the Bulgarian language. There are other such regional norms in other parts of the Bulgarian diaspora and this is one of them. In the past 75 years it transformed significantly and moved away from the official Bulgarian language. We clearly state that the language they speak is Bulgarian but that doesn’t mean that we say that those people are Bulgarians. The ethnic determination is a personal matter, said BANU Vice President Vasil Nikolov, who promoted the book.

Bulgaria is raising its demands for concessions from Macedonia as Macedonia hopes to be allowed to open EU accession talks. One of the issues is that Bulgaria wants to prevent Macedonia from having the Macedonian language made an official EU language and it’s likely that Sofia will demand definitive concessions on this issue, and on the issue of the ethnic background of a number of Macedonian historic figures, before it allows the opening of accession talks.