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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 however that nearly all surviving references to antagonisms and differences between Greeks and Macedonians exist in the written speeches of Arrian, who lived at the time of the Roman Empire, when any notion of an ethnic disparity between Macedonians and other Greeks was incomprehensible. [314]
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.
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]
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.
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 .
Today this community is a remnant from the times of Communist Yugoslavia. Then many Greek communists fled Greece due to the Greek Civil War as political refugees. [3] Today here live mostly their descendants. [4] Ethnologue cites Greek as an "immigrant language" in North Macedonia. [5] In 2002, 422 individuals declared themselves as Greeks in ...