 Some of the names use the family to which the language belongs to disambiguate it from ancient Macedonian, or from the homonymous dialect of modern Greek; sometimes the autonym "Makedonski" is used in English for the modern Slavic language, with "Macedonian" being reserved for the ancient language.Affirmation of the classification of Macedonian as a separate language is an important issue for the ethnic Macedonian self-view.Critics often treat it as a dialect of Bulgarian, due to their close structural affinity and mutual intelligibility in both written and spoken forms; they also point to Macedonian's recent emergence as a separate standard language, and the political motivation behind its promotion in the mid-20th century.