This article presents the history of the codification of the Macedonian Standard beginning with the activities of Macedonian intellectuals in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth Century, whose efforts led to the defining of the dialectal basis ofthefuture Standard.
The author discusses the main principles of the codification, the choice of the alphabet, and the Orthographie rules. He describes the west-central dialectal basis chosen and insists on the fact that from the very beginning of the Implementation process the Standard System was open not only to lexemes and derivationalpatterns typical ofthe other Macedonian dialects, but also to functional categorial patterns typical of these dialects.
Consequently, the Standard of today is richer and allows more functional and formal Variation than the underlying west-central dialectal System.