Ancient Macedonian (Μακεδονική) was the language spoken by the Macedonians during the 1st millennium BC. Little is known about the language as it was a vernacular with no literary tradition and gradually fell out of use during the Hellenistic period as Koine Greek became the dominant lingua franca across the region.

Classification

The classification of ancient Macedonian has been a subject of debate among scholars due to the limited evidence available. Some consider it a dialect of Ancient Greek, specifically a part of the Northwest Doric group of dialects. This view is supported by scholars like Friedrich Wilhelm Sturz, Olivier Masson, and Michael Meier-Brügger. Another suggestion, proposed by scholars such as August Fick and N. G. L. Hammond, is that ancient Macedonian was related to Aeolic Greek. Others propose that ancient Macedonian was a sister language of Greek, forming a Greco-Macedonian subgroup within the Hellenic language family. Proponents of this view include Vladimir Georgiev and Eric P. Hamp.

Most surviving inscriptions from ancient Macedonia are in Attic Greek or Koine Greek, which were used for administrative and literary purposes. However, some fragmentary documentation of the local vernacular variety comes from onomastic evidence, ancient glossaries, and recent epigraphic discoveries. Due to the fragmentary sources, only a little is understood about the specific features of the ancient Macedonian language. One notable sound-law is that the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates sometimes appear as voiced stops in Macedonian, whereas they were generally unvoiced in other Ancient Greek dialects.