Skopje, 26 January 2026 (MIA)

Jovanka Kepeska

On this day eighty years ago (January 26, 1946), the first Macedonian grammar book was published. Macedonian Grammar, written by Krume Kepeski, was created during the first years of a free national, political, economic, and cultural development of the Macedonian people. Kepeski’s daugther, Jovanka Kepeska, marks the 80th anniversary of Macedonian Grammar with a brief overview of its creation. 

In 1943, at the meeting of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) in Jajce, it was decided that the Macedonian people would join the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia as an equal and independent nation. Then, with a decision of the Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM) in 1944, Macedonians were formally and officially able to use their own language.

All social efforts at the time were directed toward the shaping of a literary language. Collective works were published, the alphabet and orthography, and the first Macedonian grammar book – authored individually by Krume Kepeski – was published as well, laying the foundations of the Macedonian literary language.

It was a time when a broad school network was already being established across the territory liberated from fascist rule. Schools began holding classes in the Macedonian language. The teaching staff was small – only 360 primary school teachers and 93 professors with formal training – but with passion and determination they held classes in the mother tongue, bringing Macedonian into the classrooms of the country's schools.

The first steps in popularizing the Macedonian language and the nurturing of the Macedonian culture were taken through the press – newspapers such as Nova Makedonija and Mlad Borec, journals like Makedonka, Ilindenski Pat, and Naroden Vojnik – as well as through Macedonian broadcasts over Radio Skopje, the performances of the National Theatre in Skopje, and the works of young writers.

In such circumstances, the need for a Macedonian grammar book was felt more strongly than ever, as a tool that would allow the people of Macedonia to truly learn and master their own language.

Recognizing the urgent need of that historical moment and driven by a desire to help his people, Krume Kepeski undertook the task of writing the first Macedonian grammar book. He worked on it for seven or eight months, from February to August 1945. The book was printed in Nish, in the autumn of 1945, and published on January 26, 1946.

“I came to the idea of writing a grammar book on my own,” Kepeski would say, “it wasn’t due to a directive as was the case for other things. In a way I worked in secret. The only ones who knew I was working on a grammar book were Ljuben Lape, who was a senior education official at the time, and Krum Toshev, both of whom were my friends from childhood and from my student years. These men gave me not only collegial encouragement but, considering the social roles they held, also conveyed the broader social impetus of the general public and national enthusiasm. Before me I had one more great encouragement – ASNOM's decision establishing the Macedonian language as an offiical language of the Macedonian state”.

The remarkable contribution in the linguistic sphere during the years after the country’s liberation were built upon the efforts of the Macedonian intellegentsia which was already established before the Second World War, to which Krume Kepeski belonged.

The idea to start working on a grammar book of the Macedonian literary language had been simmering in Krume Kepeski’s mind even before the liberation. For years he carried out grammatical research, focusing mainly on the dialects spoken in Prilep and Bitola. Through his work, he became deeply familiar with the grammatical structure of one of these dialects, which later became the foundation of the country’s literary language and which shares many similarities with other central dialects. At the beginning of 1941, Kepeski developed his approach in his work on the Prilep dialect, where he laid out the grammatical structure of the dialect.

There were other, earlier attempts to write a grammar book in Church Russian-Slavonic during the 1850s. Partenija Zografski created a grammar book, but its publication was blocked by the Bulgarian Exarchate based in Tsarigrad. Similar attempts were made by Kuzman Shapkarev, Dimitar V. Makedonski, and Gjorgji Pulevski. Between 1869 and 1871, Venjamin Machukovski, a teacher originally from the village of Machukovo near Gevgelija, set about composing a Macedonian grammar book. His plan was to publish a grammar based on the Gevgelija dialect. In 1872 he even placed an announcement in a Tsarigrad newspaper inviting subscriptions for the grammar, which he used in manuscript form in his teaching practice. The grammar was never published, however, because the Bulgarian Exarchate prevented it, just as in the earlier cases.

Later, at the beginning of the 20th century, as Krumе Kepeski himself notes: “Krste Misirkov, in his book On Macedonian Matters, gave primary importance to the literary language for the Macedonians. Through their own literary language, he said, the Macedonian people would be able to free themselves from the ‘webs before their eyes’ imposed by propaganda and hegemonists. In his book, Misirkov demonstrated and provided a model of how one should write in the Macedonian literary language. As is well known, he designated the central Macedonian region, that is, the Prilep-Bitola-Veles dialect, as the foundation for the literary language.”

Kepeski’s Macedonian Grammar, as a pioneering work of its kind and created at a time when it was urgently needed, stands as a major national and cultural achievement and played a highly important social role. It filled the gap that had long been felt – the absence of a grammar textbook for the Macedonian literary language in the country’s schools and among all those eager to learn their literary tongue.

With a decision of the Ministry of People's Education of Macedonia on January 24, 1946, the Grammar was approved as a textbook in secondary schools.

Although the Grammar was originally intended for study in secondary schools, it soon became a textbook for the entire nation. The interest in the first Macedonian Grammar was so great that the initial print run of 16.000 copies was quickly exhausted, prompting the release of a second edition in 1947, followed by a third in 1950.

Copies of the book were sent to various parts of the world, to Macedonians abroad, libraries, and research institutions.

What was accomplished with the first Macedonian Grammar was the formal recognition of an objective linguistic reality and culture, shaped by Macedonians over the centuries, as its author, Professor Krume Kepeski, put it, noting that “the Grammar clearly shows that the Macedonian language differs phonetically, morphologically, and syntactically from the neighboring languages – Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian – and that it possesses its own distinct structure, established with the formation of the Macedonian people and further developed afterwards. As such, the language bears witness to our national identity, and no distortions or falsifications, fueled by hegemonistic ideas, can conceal the truth of Macedonian reality.” (Krume Kepeski, 1976).