Glosses

For some reason or other, nationalists expect “the science of linguistics” to prove that their (sometimes opposing) points of view are right beyind doubt. In the case of Macedonian language and state, there is a heated discussion, which can be reduced to a familiar question: “what is language? what is dialect?”

Androitis, Nicholas P. The Federative Republic of Skopje and its Language. Athens, 1966.
(the Slavs have no right to the name “Macedonian” which belongs to the Greeks; “Macedonia” is exchanged by “Republic of Skopje”).

Any judgement […] must depend on an objective definition of what constitutes a separate language. And such a definition can only be based on the science of linguistics which admits no political considerations (my emphasis-R.). Only if, for political expediency, in order to provide a basis for an autonomous state, the science of linguistics were to be revised and a new definitions of the term “language” devised, so that the latter could be taken to mean much smaller and insignificant differences between related linguistic forms, only then could the Slav idiom of the State of Skopje be called a language. In that case, however, a radical re-drawing of the world’s linguistic map would be necessary…

(Hmmm. and where is the definition of the term “language” which needs to be revised? Pray, show it to me.)

Linguists, however, hope that the speakers solve their problems between themselves:
Lunt, Horace. On Macedonian Nationality. Slavic Review:

Now, everyone knows that languages are divided into dialects, which by definition are less important than the superordinate language. Bulgarian scholars flatly declare all varieties of Slavic spoken within their dream frontier (established by means of historical and ethnographic definitions, often of dubious validity) to be “dialects of the Bulgarian language” and produce more or less reliable objective comparative lists of differences in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon from selected villages to prove their point. But some of the same lists have been used by Serbs to demonstrate that these villagers speak Serbian. However, any competent linguist understands that the most meticulous classification […] is a scholarly artifact.In the real world, the speakers decide what languages they speak; linguists ought to respect their decisions (my emphasis-R.). We know very well that the natives of one region may deem radically different dialect types to belong to one language(Germany-Switzerland-Austria, Italy, Slovenia) while elsewhere (e.g Czechoslovakia, Byelorussia) speakers declare objectively very similar language types to be separate units.