ARVANITIC, THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANCIENT MACEDONIANS
Plutarch tells us that Alexander the Great, after killing Cleitus in a moment of drunken rage, called out to his guards “in Macedonian.” This statement has been known for centuries. It is clear. It is explicit. And yet it is systematically neutralized, relativized, or explained away—because it is inconvenient.
If “Macedonian” were simply Greek, Plutarch’s remark would be meaningless. Authors do not specify a language unless there is a contrast. No one writes that a man shouted “in Greek” when Greek is the only language in the room. The very need to name Macedonian presupposes linguistic difference. This is not an interpretation; it is elementary logic.
So the question is unavoidable: what was this Macedonian language?
It could not have been Slavic. This should not even be a subject of discussion, yet it is endlessly recycled. Slavs appear in the Balkans roughly a millennium after Alexander. To project their language backward into the 4th century BCE is not scholarship; it is anachronism dressed as politics. Chronology alone demolishes this hypothesis.
What remains, then, is a frantic attempt to dissolve Macedonian into “a Greek dialect,” despite the absence of any clear linguistic pathway that explains why Macedonian would suddenly require translation, emotional code-switching, or explicit naming. This position survives not because it is convincing, but because it is convenient. Linguistics here bends to ideology.
The real evidence lies where official historiography refuses to look: toponyms, substrate vocabulary, and ethnolinguistic continuity.
Macedonia is covered with ancient place names—Arethousa, Argos, Vergi, Vergina, Veria, Pella, Serres, Fyska—that can be coherently interpreted through Arvanitic. Not occasionally. Not symbolically. Systematically. Toponyms do not lie. They do not adopt fashionable identities. They outlive empires and administrative languages. When an entire geographical region speaks through one linguistic code, it is not coincidence; it is residue.
Strabo, unlike modern commentators, had no reason to lie. He openly states that the languages of the Thesprotians, Molossians, and Macedonians were similar. These populations form a continuous belt from Epirus to Macedonia—geographically, culturally, and linguistically. The surprise is not that they shared a language, but that modern scholarship pretends otherwise.
Even more damaging to the official narrative are everyday words—humble, unliterary, unprestigious words—such as those for elderly men and women. Macedonians, Molossians, and Thesprotians used the same terms that Arvanites still use today (pliakat, among others). This is the kind of evidence historians dislike, because it cannot be easily politicized or “reinterpreted.” It survives precisely because it was never written down.
Alexander’s linguistic behavior now becomes obvious. When he spoke “Macedonian,” he did what every leader does in moments of crisis: he abandoned the language of ceremony and turned to the language of blood, memory, and instinct. Exactly as Admiral Pavlos Koundouriotis did when he addressed the Hydriots and Spetsiots aboard the Averof before battle. He did not speak the purified, administrative language. He spoke the language they lived in.
To deny this parallel is to deny how human communication works.
And yet we are told to search for Macedonian in inscriptions. In inscriptions! As if the language of stone were the language of the hearth. As if English shop signs in modern Athens prove that Athenians are English-speaking. As if the language of bureaucracy has ever represented the language of the people.
By the same logic, Aristotle’s Greek lessons to Alexander are invoked as proof of Greek linguistic identity. This argument is almost comical. By this reasoning, the European aristocracy of the 19th century was French, because their children studied French. Or pianists, because they took piano lessons. Education signals status, not origin.
If one insists on this confusion, then one must also accept its grotesque consequences: that the Arvanites of Hydra and Spetses spoke katharevousa, that Admiral Koundouriotis was linguistically closer to Saint Paul than to his sailors, and that identity is determined by grammar books rather than by lived speech. At this point, history turns into farce.
The refusal to seriously consider Arvanitic as a key to ancient Macedonian is not a scholarly failure; it is an act of intellectual fear. It threatens too many comfortable narratives. It destabilizes too many “certainties” built after the fact. So it is dismissed—not with arguments, but with silence.
In the accompanying images, we see Alexander Kerasphoros—a title shared by Pyrrhus and Skanderbeg—and Pavlos Koundouriotis, admiral and later President of Greece. The connection is not symbolic decoration. It is historical continuity: leaders who understood that power does not speak in the language of administration, but in the language of the people.
The language of ancient Macedonia will never be found where historians have been looking. It lives where they have refused to look: beneath the official Greek veneer, beneath inscriptions, beneath schools and academies—in the deep Arvanitic layer of the Balkans, stubborn, ignored, and still alive.
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