BULGARIAN

Bulgarian is a Southern Slavic language mainly in Bulgaria, but also in Ukraine, Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Canada, USA, Australia, Germany and Spain. Bulgarian is mutually intelligible with Macedonian, and fairly closely related to Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Slovenian. The language itself is affiliated to the Slavic language family. first written Slavic language, 9th century C.E.

Table of Contents
History Speakers Words of Bulgarian Bulgarian language on websites Regulatory body Dialects References

History

Bulgarian was the first Slavic language to be written: it start to appear in writing during the 9th century in the Glagolitic alphabet, which was gradually replaced by an early version of the Cyrillic alphabet over the following centuries.

At the end of the 18th century the Russian version of Cyrillic or the "civil script" of Peter the Great (1672-1725) was adapated to write Bulgarian as a result of the influence of printed books from Russia. During the 19th century a number of versions of this alphabet containing between 28 and 44 letters were used. In the 1870s a version of the alphabet with 32 letters proposed by Marin Drinov became widely used. This version remained in use until the orthographic reform of 1945 when the letters yat (Ѣ ѣ), and yus (Ѫ ѫ) were removed from the alphabet.

Speakers

Today it has about 12 million speakers in the world.

Words of Bulgarian

Words of Bulgarian are derived from a modern literary language based on vernacular spoken Bulgarian was standardized after Bulgaria became independent in 1878. Many Turkish words were adopted into Bulgarian during the long period of Ottoman rule. Words have also been borrowed from Latin, Greek, Russian, French, Italian, German and increasingly from English.

Bulgarian language on websites

Bulgarian language ranks on 27^th on its content available on net.

Regulatory body

Institute for the Bulgarian language at the Bulgarian acadamey of sciences.

Dialects

The official, written, Bulgarian is the same for the whole territory of the country. Whereas in spoken Bulgarian, there are several regional variations, which very slightly differ from each other.

1. In the West, mainly in the area surrounding the capitol Sofia – there is the “shopski” dialect, named after the region.

2. In the North-east Bulgaria, named after the country’s largest sea-port Varna – “varnenski” dialect.

3. “plovdivski” – in the city of Plovdiv and the area around it.