“Today’s members of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or narod, speak a Slavic language codified only after 1944 with fewer than 2 million native-speakers and a slender body of literature. Macedonians are, for the most part, members of an Orthodox Church whose authority was established by a socialist political regime in 1968. Their kin-terms, household structures, marriage practices, and vernacular culture all closely resemble those of neighbouring groups. They are descended from people who were called, and at times called themselves, Serbs or Bulgarians”