Phonology
Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | и /i/ | у /u/ | |
| Mid | е /ɛ/ | о /ɔ/ | |
| Open | а /a/ |
In addition, the schwa appears in certain literary words in which it is always stressed. In orthography it is expressed by an apostrophe, like in к'на (henna). A more common usage of the schwa, however, is found in certain dialects or loanwords.
| Bilabial | Labio- Dental |
Dental | Alveolar | Post- Alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||||||||||
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | c | ɟ | k | ɡ | ||||||
| Affricate | t͡s | d͡z | t͡ʃ | d͡ʒ | ||||||||||
| Fricative | f | v | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | x | |||||||
| Approximant | j | |||||||||||||
| Trill | r | |||||||||||||
| Lateral | ɫ | l | ||||||||||||
Macedonian exhibits final obstruent devoicing and syllabic /r/
Other than recent loanwords, word stress in Macedonian is antepenultimate, meaning it falls on the third from last syllable in words with three or more syllables, and on the first or only syllable in other words. By comparison, in standard Bulgarian, the stress can fall anywhere within a word.
Read more about this topic: Macedonian Language