The modern Macedonian alphabet was developed by linguists in the period after the Second World War, who based their alphabet on the phonetic alphabet of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, though a similar writing system was used by Krste Misirkov in the late 19th century. The Macedonian language had previously been written using the Early Cyrillic alphabet, or later using the Cyrillic alphabet with local adaptations from either the Serbian or Bulgarian alphabets.
The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Macedonian alphabet, along with the IPA value for each letter:
| Cyrillic IPA |
А а /a/ |
Б б /b/ |
В в /v/ |
Г г /ɡ/ |
Д д /d/ |
Ѓ ѓ /ɟ/ |
Е е /ɛ/ |
Ж ж /ʒ/ |
З з /z/ |
Ѕ ѕ /dz/ |
И и /i/ |
| Cyrillic IPA |
Ј ј /j/ |
К к /k/ |
Л л /l/ |
Љ љ /lj/ |
М м /m/ |
Н н /n/ |
Њ њ /ɲ/ |
О о /ɔ/ |
П п /p/ |
Р р /r/ |
С с /s/ |
| Cyrillic IPA |
Т т /t/ |
Ќ ќ /c/ |
У у /u/ |
Ф ф /f/ |
Х х /x/ |
Ц ц /ts/ |
Ч ч /tʃ/ |
Џ џ /dʒ/ |
Ш ш /ʃ/ |
Macedonian orthography is consistent and phonemic in practice, an approximation of the principle of one grapheme per phoneme. A principle represented by Adelung's saying, "write as you speak and read as it is written" („пишувај како што зборуваш и читај како што е напишано“). Though as with most, if not all, living languages it has its share of inconsistencies and exceptions.
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