The paper presents an analysis of the voicing of the phoneme /v/ in modern spoken Macedonian. The phoneme /v/ in the standard Macedonian language is classifi ed as a fricative, but some of its characteristics separate it from the other phonemes in this group. This is due to the fact that this phoneme was once a sonorant. In a part of the Macedonian dialects this phoneme is pronounced with marked voicing to this day. This phenomenon is then refl ected in the pronunciation of standard Macedonian. Our analysis is based on a selected corpus of examples that have been spoken by speakers from various dialect origins, in order to assess the any differences in pronouncing of the phoneme /v/ when placed in different phoneme contexts in the word.

The authors analyze the new book The place of the Macedonian phonetics within the Slavic and Balkan linguistic area from Irena Sawicka and Anna Cychnerska. The book is trying to shed new light on the place of Macedonian phonetics regarding its Slavic heritage and also regarding the contact changes that appeared during development of the Macedonian language in the Balkan linguistic league. Their research is conducted on Macedonian dialects represented in Common linguistic atlas (OLA) and in Phonological bases of the Macedonian dialects from B. Vidoeski. In their book, Sawicka and Cychnerska state that they use diachronic data, but their main goal is to present selected synchronic features from the Macedonian phonetics. They explain most of the phonetic features in Macedonian from an areal-typological aspect with special emphasis on the Balkan convergences. The authors of the book state that the Macedonian phonetic should be included in southwest type of Slavic phonetics. They conclude that the modern form of Macedonian phonetic, to large extent, was influenced by areal position of the Macedonian language and to its development in the Balkan multilingual territory.