Božidar Vidoeski

Božidar "Božo" Vidoeski (8 November 1920 – 16 May 1998; ) was a Macedonian linguist and the founder of Macedonian dialectology.

Biography Božidar Vidoeski was born with the surname Vidojević on 8 November 1920 in Zvečan, then in South Serbia, part of Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. After studying in Prilep, Kragujevac and Skopje, he studied Russian philology at the Belgrade University under Serbian linguist Aleksandar Belić. During the World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia, he supported the Serbian Chetnik movement of Draža Mihajlović, and at the end of the war he switched to the side of the Yugoslav partisans. Afterwards Vidoeski studied Macedonian philology at the Skopje University under Macedonian linguist Blaže Koneski. He graduated in 1949 from Skopje and immediately became an assistant at the Department of Macedonian and South Slavic languages there. After that year, he was also the author of a number of articles and monographs on Macedonian dialectology and comparative Slavic philology. In 1950, he was one of the founders of the journal Makedonski jazik (Macedonian Language), as well as its editor from 1973 to his death.

His geographical placement of the Macedonian dialects in dialectological maps was resented in Bulgarian academic circles, who noted that the dialectal area presented by him, entered deep into Bulgarian, Greek and Albanian territory. He became a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1962 and Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1974. Vidoeski retired in 1986. In 1994, he joined the Polish Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1997. After his death, in 2013, Bulgarian researcher Georgi Mitrinov criticized him for having falsified the data about the Bulgarian population in Macedonia from Bulgarian ethnographer Vasil Kanchov by replacing the ethnonym "Bulgarians" with "Macedonians" in his work ('Phonological Bases of the Dialects of the Macedonian Language').