Sofia university professor Aleksandar Kosev condemned Bulgarian politicians for insisting that the Macedonian language is a dialect of the Bulgarian, saying it is an unscientific approach to declare one dialect as “correct”, while the other as derived.

These is outdated use of terms like language and nation, as if these are things not created by man but given by God, who grew out like lettuce in the fields of life. I considered going deeper into explaining this but given how traditional Bulgarian historiography and linguistics are deep in the weeds of romanticized notions, I can just imagine what kinds of “specialists” I will provoke. Let me just say that the borders of a language are not something that is given and there is no predetermined relationship between a “language” and its “dialects”. They were defined under long political, geopolitical and geocultural conflicts. It’s bad when imaginary worlds enter into a party and this party enters the Parliament determined to defend allegedly patriotic causes, Kosev said in a Facebook comment.

He is one of the dozen or so Bulgarian professors and experts who have criticized the position of the Borisov Government, and the opposition socialists, with regard to Macedonia and the Bulgarian demands that the Macedonian nation and language should be seen as derived from the Bulgarian.