A rulebook that teaches any AI language model (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other) to write natural business Macedonian instead of translated-sounding "foreigner Macedonian".
AI models know Macedonian grammar but lack Macedonian instinct. Left alone they produce English thoughts wearing Cyrillic letters — sentences that are individually correct and collectively wrong. A native reader spots it instantly, usually from a single calqued idiom (for example „одговарајте од стомак" for "answer from the gut" — an expression no Macedonian has ever said).
BUSINESS-MACEDONIAN.md is the cure: an operating manual, instructions in English, examples in Macedonian.
▶ Live calque checker: dancommun.github.io/business-macedonian — paste Macedonian text, see the tells flagged instantly.
The guide has eight sections:
- The anti-calque law — the deadliest mistake, with a growing blacklist of caught calques
- Sentence architecture — clitic doubling, information order, verb placement, sentence length
- How to make a point — claim-first attribution, giving institutions a voice, argument shape by genre
- Connector lexicon — frequency-based: which connectors natives actually use vs. the "bookish" ones AI overuses (that barely appear in real prose)
- Business phrase bank — ~110 natural collocations, Macedonian + English meaning
- Register — the
Виеform, formal-but-warm business tone, numbers, evidentiality - Mandatory self-review checklist — the "would a native say this aloud?" pass
- Typography — quotes, number formats, dashes
- Marketing & sales register — the ти-vs-Вие map, native CTAs and slogans, brand-story voice, and the "решенија" calque plague
- Formal document & proposal register — report and strategy prose: frozen salutations and sign-offs, nominalized objectives, indirect commitment, double-hedged forecasts, the dense formal-connector inventory
- Email & correspondence register — vocative salutations, the sign-off hierarchy, a functional phrase bank, and the email calques to never open with
- Social & short-form register — posts and thought-leadership: reader-first hooks, rhythm-driven argument, closes that reject engagement-bait, and the LinkedIn calque family
The rules were derived by reverse-engineering roughly 87,000 words of real, human-written Macedonian business prose — news, columns, interviews and analysis from Macedonian economy and finance desks, most of it published before 2023 so no AI could have influenced it. The method was literal back-translation: take a native sentence, translate it word-for-word into English, and every place the English breaks marks a Macedonian-specific pattern. See the appendix of BUSINESS-MACEDONIAN.md for the full method and confidence notes.
Fastest — set it and forget it: copy the ready-made prompt in SYSTEM-PROMPT.md into your ChatGPT custom instructions, a Claude Project, or a Gemini Gem. Your AI then follows the guide in every reply, with nothing to attach.
In a hurry / no room for the whole file: paste the one-page CHEATSHEET.md — the 10 rules that catch almost everything.
Full power: attach or add BUSINESS-MACEDONIAN.md itself — the complete manual with examples, the connector table, and the ~110-phrase business phrase bank. Works as project knowledge, a skill file, or a one-off attachment in any AI tool.
Best results: use the system prompt and attach the full guide — the prompt is the compressed law, the file has the detail.
See EXAMPLES.md — four real content types (cold email, sales copy, LinkedIn post, report paragraph), each shown as the AI writes it and as a native writes it, with every fix explained. The foreign versions are grammatically correct; that's exactly why they're instructive.
The checker/ folder has a tiny Node script that scans Macedonian text and flags known calques, bookish connectors, and English typography:
node checker/check-macedonian.mjs draft.mdPrefer a browser? Open web/checker.html — paste your text and see the calques and tells highlighted live, no install. It's a smoke detector, not a certificate — it catches known tells, and the read-aloud test is still the real gate. See checker/README.md.
This teaches the language, not any individual's house voice. It is business Macedonian (economy, entrepreneurship, management, finance). Layer your own tone on top.
The highest-value contribution is a caught calque — a phrase an AI produced that no native would say. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Every correction makes the guide sharper for everyone.
CC BY 4.0 — free to use, share, and adapt, with attribution.