macedonian chat romanization

Macedonian, which is normally written in the Cyrillic alphabet, has a standard Romanization. It’s a very similar system to that used by Serbian, which is perfectly reasonable since Macedonia has long felt and to a certain extent continues to feel strong Serbian influence over its popular culture, politics, and academics.

Serbian represents its Cyrillic letters that don’t have simple Latin equivalents by using the haček, the word for a diacritic that conveniently enough appears within the word itself.

The haček was invented by Jan Hus, a Czech religious dissident of the 1400s who had terrible timing. He took on the Catholic Church about ethical abuses a hundred years before Europe was really ready for the Protestant Reformation. The Inquisition burned him at the stake.

But before he went he wrote De Orthographia Bohemica, a treatise on spelling the Czech language that suggested the rule “one letter for one sound” and proposed diacritics, including the little wedge haček, as a way of extending the Latin alphabet to accommodate the fact that most European languages have more meaningfully distinct sounds than there are simple letters in the original writing of the Romans. He specifically wanted to extend the number of consonants, which Slavic languages are famously rich in. Adding the haček to consonants such as c and s allowed him represent sounds that in English we need two letters (or more, sometimes) to represent, namely ch as in check and sh as in shoot.

Jan Hus died, but the haček lived on, and it was adopted by Vuk Karadžić, Ljudevit Gaj, and Đuro Dančić in the 1800s as they sought to create a standardized Serbo-Croatian language that could be written in either Latin or Cyrillic.

Gaj, in proposing a Croatian orthography, followed the “one letter for one sound” principle faithfully except in the cases of the Cyrillic letters њ and љ, which Gaj chose to represent with the two-letter combinations of nj and lj. This follows from the fact that “j” represents a palatal glide (like the “y” in yes), and the Cyrillic letters mentioned above are really just palatized versions of n and l. Otherwise, correspondance was one-to-one and modeled on Czech, so the haček became part of Serbo-Croatian’s Latin orthography.

Serbo-Croatian as a standard language was dying due to fights between Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian academics well before the breakup of Yugoslavia, but the Yugoslav Wars slammed the lid shut on the coffin and left the language pushing daisies. The standard Croatian language, which does not differ very radically from standard Serbian, but whose differences are fiercely protected by modern Croatian academics and some politicians, uses only the Latin alphabet.

Standard Serbian, however, still uses both Latin and Cyrillic. They are both taught to school children and you can see them both in use on the street. Latin has a more modern feeling to it, showing up in advertisements, glossy magazines, and shop signs. Cyrillic has a more academic, perhaps national or religious feeling to it, and thus is used for serious books, public signs, and things related to the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Standard Macedonian from the beginning was written just with Cyrillic, a form of Cyrillic very close to that used by Serbian except for a few letters. The dominance of Cyrillic in Macedonia continues to this day, where in contrast to Serbia it is very rare to see Macedonian written with Latin letters. Advertisements for stylish new boutiques and jetsetting credit cards that would be written in Latin in Serbia are still written in Cyrillic in Macedonia.

There is a standardized Romanization scheme for Macedonian Cyrillic, and it is quite similar to Serbian Latin, hačeks and all, but there is the pesky matter of the Cyrillic characters ќ and ѓ. In equivalent Serbian words, these are written with the Latin characters ć and đ, but ć and đ do not represent quite the same sounds as ќ and ѓ. Instead, the standard Latin transcription scheme for Macedonian calls for ǵ and ḱ, letters that your browser might not even be able to render. What you should see is a “g” with an accent mark on top of it and a “k” with an accent mark on top of it.

So there is a way of writing Macedonian in Latin. People simply don’t use it very often, and almost never if they have to transliterate something that continues ѓ or ќ. The Latin equivalents ǵ and ḱ are extremely rare. You’re not going to find them on typewriters, computer keyboards, or among the basic international character sets of Windows or OS X. No one without specialized Slavistics or linguistics training is going to know how to pronounce those two characters at first sight. It’s easier just to write in Cyrillic.

There are many circumstances these days when you can’t write in Cyrillic, though. So what do you do then?

Computers and cellphones are designed mostly with English-speakers or Western Europeans in mind and until recently they did not have good support for Cyrillic. If you wanted to write on these devices in your native language, and your native language uses only Cyrillic, you had to make due with Latin letters. Even today, when Cyrillic support is much more widespread, it can be finicky to turn it on. Even when it’s easy, the habit of writing Cyrillic-based languages in Latin has become deeply rooted in the younger generations and there’s just no way to weed it out now.

For Russians, the solution was to use the Latin letters that look similar to Cyrillic letters (like T, M, C, and K, which when capitalized are the same in Cyrillic and Latin) and combine Latin letters, numbers, or symbols together to make visual approximations of the leftover Cyrillic letters (like 3, 4, *, and W, for З, Ч, Ж, and Щ). The ad hoc writing system is called Volapyuk, a joking reference to the 19th-century constructed language Volapük that Russians considered equally as queer-looking as writing “*EHW,NHA” for “ЖЕНЩИНА”.

Macedonians didn’t have to make Latin letters look like Cyrillic letters, since they already had Serbian as a reference point for a standard way of Romanizing Macedonian Cyrillic. But there was (and still is) the problem of the hačeks (on č, ž, and š), ǵ, and ḱ. How to represent these letters?

The Macedonian youth’s answer to this question: don’t.

All of those letters are simply written c, z, s, g, and k, or very rarely gj and kj for the last two. So a Facebook status update or an SMS that would be strictly written as “Of lele kolku e žeško vo stanov, ḱe umram” is actually written “Of lele kolku e zesko vo stanov ke umram.”

Thus you have Macedonian chat romanization.

For a Macedonian, the missing hačeks and accents are easy to fill in, but for a foreigner this sort of writing takes getting used to. These days, I know Macedonian well enough that I can read and write fluent MCR, and I even have enough of a sense for the natural sounds of the language that I can guess where the hačeks should go in an unfamiliar word. But I still think the language makes a poor show when it’s written in MCR. Without the diacritics, it looks childish, too simple and repetitive.

But since anyone with enough command of the computer and time to write out full diacritics will probably just write in Cyrillic anyway, and there are still many people who don’t bother with either despite knowing how, I think MCR’s going to remain a feature of the language for decades to come.