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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, [6] which later became the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. [7]
The Kingdom of Macedonia (in dark orange) in c. 336 BC, at the end of the reign of Philip II of Macedon; other territories include Macedonian dependent states (light orange), the Molossians of Epirus (light red), Thessaly (desert sand color), the allied League of Corinth (yellow), neutral states of Sparta and Crete, and the western territories of the Achaemenid Empire in Anatolia (violet purple).
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 .
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 Macedonian dynasty (Greek: Μακεδονική Δυναστεία) ruled the Byzantine Empire from 867 to 1056, following the Amorian dynasty. During this period, the Byzantine state reached its greatest extent since the Early Muslim conquests, and the Macedonian Renaissance in letters and arts began.
Greek ethnographic map of south-eastern Balkans before the population exchanges, 1918. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) put an end to the traditional Greek policy of the "Great Idea". This allowed the Greek governments of the inter-war years to turn their attention to the country's domestic affairs and to the building of the modern Greek state.