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The overwhelming majority of the Greek Macedonians speak a variant of Greek, called Macedonian (Μακεδονίτικα, Makedonitika). It belongs to the northern dialect group, with phonological and few syntactical differences distinguishing it from standard Greek which is spoken in southern Greece.
Ernst Badian notes that nearly all surviving references to antagonisms and differences between Greeks and Macedonians exist in the written speeches of Arrian, who lived during a period (i.e. the Roman Empire) in which any notion of an ethnic disparity between Macedonians and other Greeks was incomprehensible. [232]
Macedonia (/ ˌ m æ s ɪ ˈ d oʊ n i ə / ⓘ MASS-ih-DOH-nee-ə; Greek: Μακεδονία, Makedonía), also called Macedon (/ ˈ m æ s ɪ d ɒ n / MASS-ih-don), was an ancient kingdom on the periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece, [7] which later became the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. [8]
One of these Greek approaches was the spread of the myth of the origin from Alexander the Great and Ancient Macedonians. Greek priests and academics tried to convince the local Orthodox Slavic-speaking population that they were Macedonians, directly related to Alexander the Great, and, as a result, Greeks.
Greece gained the southern parts of the region (with Thessaloniki), which corresponded to that of ancient Macedonia attributed as part of Greek history and had a strong Greek presence, [41] from the Ottoman Empire after the First Balkan War, and expanded its share in the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria.
The history of Macedonians has been shaped by population shifts and political developments in the southern Balkans, especially within the region of Macedonia.The ideas of separate Macedonian identity grew in significance after the First World War, both in Vardar and among the left-leaning diaspora in Bulgaria, and were endorsed by the Comintern.
The Pella curse tablet, a text written in a distinct Doric Greek dialect, found in 1986 and dated to between mid to early 4th century BC, has been forwarded as an argument that the ancient Macedonian language was a dialect of North-Western Greek, part of the Doric dialect group.
In 1999 the Greek Helsinki Monitor estimated that the number of people identifying as ethnic Macedonians numbered somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000, [12] [261] Macedonian sources generally claim the number of ethnic Macedonians living in Greece at somewhere between 200,000 and 350,000. [262]