Was ancient Macedonian a greek language?
Macedonian rulers and military figures had non-greek names, and Greek never spread widely among the ordinary people of Macedonia. Alexander's Macedonian troops got their commands in 'Macedonian', and some words of this language survive in Greek historical texts and glossaries.
The political ideology of modern Greece sets store by its ancient heritage. The view accepted by most Greek historians is that Phillip and his family were 'Greek' (after all, they spoke Greek) and that, in any case, ancient Macedonian was a form of Greek. In fact the recognised ancient Greek dialects, such as Doric, Ionic and Aeloic, were already so different fom one another that, looking only at their forms and setting aside their cultural interconnections, modern linguists might well have defined them as separate languages. Macedonian was very different again from any of these. Many scholars outside Greece prefer to say that it was Indo-European (like other languages of the ancient Balkans) but not Greek.
