History of The Macedonian Language - Byzantine Era

Byzantine Era

The Slavs first began arriving to the Balkan peninsula in the 6th and 7th centuries. In the 9th century, the monks Cyril and Methodius developed the first writing system for the Slavonic languages. At this time, the Slavic dialects were so close as to make it practical to develop the written language on the dialect of a single region. There is dispute as to the precise region, but it is likely that they were developed on the dialect of the region of Thessaloniki. This written standard came to be known as Old Church Slavonic, and some linguists refer to this as the "first standardization of a Slavic Macedonian dialect".

The earliest texts showing specifically Macedonian phonetic features are Old Church Slavonic classical texts written in Glagolitic which date from the 10th to 11th centuries (Codex Zographensis, Codex Assemanianus, Psalterium Sinaiticum). By the 12th century the Church Slavonic Cyrillic become the main alphabet. Texts reflecting vernacular Macedonian language features appear in the second half of the 16th century (translations of the sermons of the Greek writer Damascene Studite).