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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. 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.
Dictionary of Bulgarian words and related Bulgarian
Language resources
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Bulgar Words and Expressions - Features of the old (Turkic) Bulgar
language that have been preserved in the modern (Slavic) language.
- HPSG-Based Syntactic Treebank of
Bulgarian - Project to create a high quality set of syntactic structures
of Bulgarian sentences within the framework of HPSG.
- The
Pomaks - Sociolinguistic survey of the Pomaks, a 30,000-strong Muslim
Slavic-speaking community living in Western Thrace (Northern Greece). Their
language is essentially a Bulgarian dialect.
- The Bulgarian
Rechnik - Contains words and expressions in six languages - Bulgarian,
English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian.
Related Popular Terms for searching to get more
resources
Grammar
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:
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 modeled 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.
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