Ancient Macedonian language

Ancient Macedonian was the language of the ancient Macedonians. It was spoken in the kingdom of Macedon during the 1st millennium BCE and it belongs to the Indo-European group of languages. It gradually fell out of use during the 4th century BCE, marginalized by Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period.Eugene N. Borza (1992) , p. 94 (citing Hammond); G. Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers (1993), ch.4.1.

Classification of the language is difficult, as it is known from only a few fragmentary surviving attestations, mainly in glosses and proper names.

A body of words has been assembled from ancient sources, mainly from inscriptions, and from the 5th-century lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, amounting to about 150 words and 200 proper names. The volume of the surviving public and private inscriptions indicate that there was no other written language in ancient Macedonia but Greek, and recent epigraphic discoveries suggest that ancient Macedonian was a variety of the Northwestern Greek dialects.Sarah B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.289

Classification

Macedonian is part of the Paleo-Balkans group within Indo-European.The...
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