Appendix:Macedonian alphabet

The Macedonian alphabet is a variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, with 31 letters.

The following section gives all of the existing methods of romanization of Macedonian, but Wiktionary uses only the most commonly accepted standard, which is widely known in Macedonia.

Romanization
The system used on Wiktionary for the transliteration (romanization) of Macedonian is defined in ISO R9:1968 (in the table marked as "ISO 9 (R:1968)+ National Academy"; this system was also adopted by the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1970, is regarded as officially codified today, and is taught in schools in the Republic of Macedonia. It uses letters with diacritics ž, č, š for Cyrillic ж, ч, ш respectively (as for many other Slavic languages), and ǵ, ḱ for the special Macedonian letters ѓ, ќ. The palatalised consonants of Cyrillic љ, њ are rendered with diagraphs lj, nj, and the voiced affricates of Cyrillic ѕ, џ with dz, dž respectively.

A more recent norm, ISO 9:1995, opts entirely for a one-to-one mapping between letters and unique uniform mappings across all Cyrillic orthographies, using diacritic combinations rather than digraphs throughout. This involves rare diacritic combinations such as ẑ, ǰ, l̂, n̂. This system is not widely used in practice for Macedonian.

At the other end of the spectrum is a system that goes wholly without diacritics and prefers digraphs instead, making it easier for use in environments where diacritics may pose a technical problem, such as typing on computers. Common usage has gj, kj for ѓ, ќ, either dj or dzh for џ, and sometimes ts for ц. Such a diacritic-free system, with digraphs zh, gj, dz, lj, nj, kj, ch, sh, dj has reportedly been adopted since 2008 for use in passports of the Republic of Macedonia.