Skopje, 15 May 2025 (MIA) — The media's Macedonian language use promotes both the standard language and linguistic innovations influencing the development of the language, so journalists need to pay attention to the way they communicate, according to participants in Krste Misirkov Macedonian Language Institute's 29th international conference held Thursday and Friday.

Speaking to reporters before the conference, Krste Misirkov Macedonian Language Institute director Elena Jovanova Grujovska said it was the media that reflected how the Macedonian language was changing.

"In fact," she said, "it is the duty of journalists to promote the standard Macedonian language in the media. However, democracy is happening all throughout society, and so there is also democracy in language." 

"For these exact reasons, there have been changes happening to us. Some changes — lexical ones, for instance — will pass. They will be in use for a year or two; then they will be forgotten, and new words will come," she said.

According to Jovanova Grujovska, "systemic changes in the morphology and syntax" do represent a problem.

"This is why we, from the Macedonian Language Institute, are here to remind people and stress that they need to pay attention to the purity of the Macedonian language," she said.

"Simply put, language use in the media — and nowadays in electronic media — is exceptionally important and influences the development of the standard Macedonian language," she said. 

Demeaning language that does not conform, Jovanovska Grujovska also said she minded that reporters were not taught the standard pronunciation and spoke in their nonstandard native accents. "Often, journalists' dialects immediately reveal which part of Macedonia they come from," she said. 

Jovanova Grujovska also said she minded that young people used foreign words and buzzwords on TV. "The media are not the place to use such expressions," she said. 

Asked for her thoughts on the matter, conference organizer Katica Topliska Evroska said the language errors most frequently seen in the media were "using words of English, Turkish or Serbian origin."

To present 35 papers on Macedonian language use in the media, more than 40 scholars have gathered Thursday at the institute's 29th conference, titled "The Language in the Media: Statuses, Challenges, Perspectives." 

The conference is being held as part of the institute's yearly Blagoja Korubin Days. The event honors the legacy of the Macedonian language scholar, researcher, anti-fascist partisan, translator and writer best known for his "Linguistic Corner" weekly feature he edited for decades in the daily newspaper Nova Makedonija. mr/