North Macedonia
Languages

The national and official language in all aspects of the whole territory of North Macedonia and in its international relations is the Macedonian language. Since 2019 Albanian is co-official at a state level (excluding defense, central police and monetary policy). Macedonian belongs to the Eastern branch of the South Slavic language group, while Albanian occupies an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. In municipalities where at least 20% of the population is part of another ethnic minority, those individual languages are used for official purposes in local government, alongside Macedonian and Albanian or just Macedonian.

Macedonian is closely related to and mutually intelligible with standard Bulgarian. It also has some similarities with standard Serbian and the intermediate Torlakian / Shop dialects spoken mostly in southeastern Serbia and western Bulgaria (and by speakers in the northeastern corner of the country). The standard language was codified in the period following World War II and has accumulated a thriving literary tradition.

Besides Macedonian and Albanian, minority languages with substantial numbers of speakers are Turkish (including Balkan Gagauz), Romani, Serbian / Bosnian and Aromanian (including Megleno-Romanian). Macedonian Sign Language is the primary language of those of the deaf community who did not pick up an oral language in childhood.

According to the last census, 1,344,815 citizens of North Macedonia declared that they spoke Macedonian, 507,989 declared Albanian, 71,757 Turkish, 38,528 Romani, 24,773 Serbian, 8,560 Bosnian, 6,884 Aromanian and 19,241 spoke other languages.
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