Bulgarian

Introduction

Bulgaria Map Bulgarian belongs to the South Slavic group of the Slavic Branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken in Bulgaria by close to 8 million people. Bulgaria Castle It is also spoken in Canada, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Moldova, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey, Ukraine, and the US. Ethnologue estimates that the total number of speakers of Bulgarian worldwide is close to 9 million people.

The history of the Bulgarian language spans several periods:

The prehistoric period occurred between the Slavic invasion of the eastern Balkans and the mission of St. Cyril and St. Methodius to Great Moravia in the 860s.
Old Bulgarian (9th to 11th century, also called Old Church Slavonic) was the language used by St. Cyril, St. Methodius and their disciples to translate the Bible and other liturgical literature from Greek. Old Bulgarian was the first Slavic language attested in writing.
Middle Bulgarian (12th to 15th century) was the period when Bulgarian underwent dramatic changes, losing the Old Slavonic case system and developing a definite article.
Modern Bulgarian dates from the 16th century onwards.

Bulgarian is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria. Speakers of Bulgarian constitute the dominant speech community of the country. All aspects of official and social life are conducted in Bulgarian. Bulgarian is the medium of instruction at all levels of education and is used in all electronic and print media.

Dialects

Contemporary Standard Bulgarian is the official variant of the language. The Palityan dialect is functionally intelligible with Standard Bulgarian.

Structure

Sound System

Bulgarian woman

Bulgarian child

Bulgarian Children

Basket woman

The sound system of Bulgarian shares many features with other Slavic languages.

Vowels
Bulgarian has six vowels /i/, /e/, //, /u/, /o/. Unstressed vowels tend to be shorter than their stressed counterparts. There is one semivowel /y/.

Consonants
A distinguishing feature of Bulgarian consonants is that most of them can be either unpalatalized (hard) or palatalized (soft). This distinction makes a difference in word meaning. Palatalization refers to a secondary articulation whereby the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate during the articulation of the consonant. In writing, palatalization is indicated by the soft sign ь or the letters и, е, ё, я, ю written after the consonant. In transcription, palatalization is indicated by an apostrophe after the letter.

Below is a table of Bulgarian consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning.

.	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Alveo-palatal	Velar
Stops (unpalatalized)	p-b	.	t-d	.	k-g
Stops (palatalized)	p'-b'	.	t'-d'	.	k'-g'
Fricatives (unpalatalized)	.	f-v	s-z	sh-zh*	x
Fricatives (palatalized)	.	f'-v'	s'-z'	.	.
Affricates (unpalatalized)	.	.	ts-dz	.	.
Affricates (palatalized)	.	.	ts'	ch	.
Nasals (unpalatalized)	m	.	n	.	.
Nasals (palatalized)	m'	.	n'	.	.
Lateral (unpalatalized)	.	.	l	.	.
Lateral (palatalized)	.	.	l'	.	.
Flap or trill (unpalatalized)	.	.	r	.	.
Flap or trill (palatalized)	.	.	r'	.	.
Semi-vowel	.	.	.	j	.

Stress
Stress can fall on any syllable in the word.

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of some common phrases in Bulgarian.
Click here to watch short videos in Bulgarian.

Grammar

Bulgarian building

Bulgarian temple

During the Middle Bulgarian period (12th-15th centuries), while Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire, the language underwent significant changes. Among them were the loss of the Old Slavonic case system, preservation of the complex Old Slavic tense-based verb system (most other Slavic languages simplified the system), and the development of a suffixed definite article (absent in all other Slavic languages). It is thought that these developments resulted from the influence of Turkish, the official language of the Ottoman Empire, as well as of other Balkan languages.

Nouns
Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are marked for the following categories:

grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter);

number (singular and plural) with some vestiges of the dual;

case (marked only in the the Accusative in animate nouns);

definiteness (expressed by a definite article attached as a suffix to the first stressed noun of the noun phrase, e.g., "man" and "the man," "woman" and "the woman."

Verbs
The Bulgarian verb system has preserved many features of Old Slavic, particularly the complex tense system. Verbs are marked for the following categories:

tense (present, past, future), expressed in a number of simple, compound, and hybrid forms;
aspect (imperfective and perfective). Perfective verbs are formed by prefixation, and most verbs form aspectual pairs, e.g., (imperfective) and (perfective);
mood (indicative, imperative, conditional, renarrative). The latter is used to convey information about doubtful or nonwitnessed events.

Unlike other Slavic languages, Bulgarian does not have an ending for the infinitive. Instead, like English, it marks the infinitive with "to," e.g., "I want to read."

Word order
The neutral word order in Bulgarian is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are possible. Word order is principally determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and focus (new information). Constituents with old information precede constituents with new information, or those that carry most emphasis.

Vocabulary

Bulgarian has borrowed many words from Greek and later from Turkish during the period of Turkish domination. As a result of a national revival at the end of the Ottoman rule in the 19th century, a modern Bulgarian literary language developed which drew heavily on Russian and Old Church Slavonic in an attempt to replace Turkish words with those of Slavic origin.

Below are a few common phrases in Bulgarian.

Samples

Writing

In 886 AD, Bulgaria adopted the Glagolitic alphabet devised by the Byzantine missionaries Saint Cyril and Methodius in the 850s. The Glagolitic alphabet was gradually superseded in the following centuries by the Cyrillic alphabet developed in the beginning of the 10th century. It was modelled primarily on the Greek alphabet with some letters borrowed from the earlier Glagolitic alphabet. At the end of the 18th century, it was replaced by the Russian "civil" orthography, the result of the efforts of Peter the Great to modernize all aspects of Russian society, including orthography. In the late 1800s, an alphabet consisting of 32 letters proposed by Marin Drinov gained acceptance. It was used until 1945, when another orthographic reform resulted in the current Bulgarian alphabet which has 30 letters.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Bulgarian. You can click on the sound icon to listen to it being read.

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Resources

Click here to find out where Bulgarian is taught in the United States.

Resources for the study of Bulgarian language and culture
Library of Congress Portals to the World: Bulgaria
Wikipedia article on Bulgarian
Yamada Language Center Guide - Bulgarian
Ethnologue Report on Bulgarian
UCLA Language Profiles - Bulgarian
UCLA Language Materials for the Less Commonly Taught Languages
The World Wide Web Virtual Library for Russian & East European Studies
BBC Country Profile: Bulgaria
English-Bulgarian Online Dictionary
Mongabay Bulgarian Language Resources
SEERC Webliography of Bulgarian