Aleksandar Stoyanov Teodorov-Balan (Bulgarian: Александър Стоянов Теодоров-Балан; 27 October 1859 – 12 February 1959) was a Bulgarian linguist, historian and bibliographer.
Balan was born in the Bessarabian village of Kubei, today in Bolhrad Raion, Odesa Oblast, Russian Empire, to a Bessarabian Bulgarian family. His brothers are the Bulgarian general Georgi Todorov, the lawyer and mayor of Sofia Martin Todorov, Prof. Atanas Teodorov and Eng. Mihail Balanski.
Bulgarian dialects are the regional varieties of the Bulgarian language, a South Slavic language. Bulgarian dialectology dates to the 1830s and the pioneering work of Neofit Rilski, Bolgarska gramatika (published 1835 in Kragujevac, Principality of Serbia). Other notable researchers in this field include Marin Drinov, Konstantin Josef Jireček, Lyubomir Miletich, Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan, Stoyko Stoykov.
The dialects of Macedonian are classified as part of Bulgarian in the older literature. Presently, Bulgarian linguistics continue to treat it as such.Since the second half of the 20th century, foreign authors have mostly adopted the convention of treating these in terms of a separate Macedonian language, following the codification of Macedonian as the literary standard language of Yugoslav Macedonia. However, some contemporary linguists still consider Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian. Macedonian authors in turn tend to treat all dialects spoken in the geographical region of Macedonia as Macedonian, including those spoken in Bulgarian Macedonia. Together with their closest lexical and grammatical relative they comprise the Eastern South Slavic branch. The present article treats all these dialects together, because of their close structural similarity and the fact that many important dialect boundaries intersect both territories.
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