The Macedonian language was marked as a unique language, separate from other Slavic languages, in a lexicon prepared by Russian ethnographer Ivan Sakharov, all the way back to 1849.

In the Tales of the Russian People, Sakharov cites the Macedonian as a language along with the Serbian, the Greek, and other languages. Macedonia is currently involved in a dispute with Bulgaria, which claims that the Macedonian language is just a dialect of the Bulgarian, and was “invented” after the Second World War.