Bulgarian (Български език) is a Southern Slavic language with about 12 million speakers 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 is fairly closely related to Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Slovenian.

Along with the Macedonian language (collectively forming the East South Slavic languages), it is a member of the Balkan sprachbund. The two languages have several characteristics that set them apart from all other Slavic languages: changes include the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite article and the lack of a verb infinitive, but it retains and has further developed the Proto-Slavic verb system. One such major development is the innovation of evidential verb forms to encode for the source of information: witnessed, inferred, or reported.

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.

History

The history of Bulgarian language can be divided into three periods:

9th–11th centuries: Old Bulgarian is only attested as Old Church Slavonic, a highly inflected literary language employed to translate religious texts from Greek, in the First Kingdom of Bulgaria.

12th–15th centuries: Middle Bulgarian experienced radical phonological and morphological changes (e.g. loss of noun declension). It is attested in many literary works.

15th c.-present: Modern Bulgarian. From the early 15th century until 1878, Bulgaria was under Turk Ottoman domination when the language was neglected. Afterwards, it experienced a revival when it was purged from many Old Church Slavonic, Russian, and other foreign words.

Bulgarian emerged more than a millennium ago when the Slavs, who had arrived in the middle of the 1st millennium AD to the eastern Balkan Peninsula, were conquered by the Bulgars. The newcomers established the First Bulgarian Kingdom (681-1018) and, even if they were ethnically Turkic, adopted the language of their Slavic subjects. The geographical and political isolation from other Slavs led these Southern Slavs to develop their own dialects.

Bulgarian was first attested in the late 9th century as a literary language, known as Old Church Slavonic, developed by the monks Cyril and Methodius to translate religious texts from Greek. It was based on different local dialects and, hence, had two varieties: the Eastern one is considered to be Old Bulgarian while the western one is considered to be Old Macedonian. In the Medieval period, from the 12th to 15th centuries, the language experienced radical changes, particularly the loss of noun declension, which paved the way to Modern Bulgarian.

The modern language is very close to Macedonian, both have (almost completely) lost all case declensions, and both have been influenced by Balkan non-Slavic languages, like Greek, Albanian and Romanian, as shown by certain features found in them but not in other Slavic languages. For example, Bulgarian, like Romanian and Albanian, has a schwa-like central vowel in stressed syllables, a postposed definite article, and lacks an infinitive which is replaced by a subordinate clause (this also happens in Modern Greek).

Phonology

Vowels

Bulgarian vowels may be grouped in three pairs according to their backness: the front vowels е (/ɛ/) and и (/i/), the central vowels а (/a/) and ъ (/ɤ/) and the back vowels о (/ɔ/) and у (/u/).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	ɛ	ɤ	ɔ
Low		a

In stressed syllables, six vowels are phonemic. Unstressed vowels tend to be shorter and weaker compared to their stressed counterparts, and the corresponding pairs of open and closed vowels approach each other with a tendency to merge, above all as low (open and open-mid) vowels are raised and shift towards the high (close and close-mid) ones. However, the coalescence is not always complete. The vowels are often distinguished in emphatic or deliberately distinct pronunciation, and reduction is strongest in colloquial speech. Besides that, some linguists distinguish two degrees of reduction, as they have found that a clearer distinction tends to be maintained in the syllable immediately preceding the stressed one. The complete merger of the pair /a/ – /ɤ/ is regarded as most common, while the status of /ɔ/ vs /u/ is less clear. The coalescence of /ɛ/ and /i/ is not allowed in formal speech and is regarded as a provincial (East Bulgarian) dialectal feature; instead, unstressed /ɛ/ is both raised and centralized, approaching [ɤ]. The /ɤ/ vowel itself does not exist as a phoneme in other Slavic languages, though a similar reduced vowel transcribed as [ə] does occur.

Consonants

		Labial	Dental	Palatal	Velar
Stop	*voiceless*	p pʲ	t tʲ		k kʲ
Stop	*voiced*	b bʲ	d dʲ		ɡ ɡʲ
Affricate	*voiceless*		ts tsʲ	tʃ
Affricate	*voiced*			dʒ
Fricative	*voiceless*	f fʲ	s sʲ	ʃ	x
Fricative	*voiced*	v vʲ	z zʲ	ʒ
Nasal		m mʲ	n nʲ
Trill			r rʲ
Lateral			l lʲ
Glide				j

Bulgarian has a total of 36 consonant phonemes (see table above). Three additional phonemes can also be found ([xʲ], [dz], and [dzʲ]), but only in foreign proper names such as Хюстън /xʲustɤn/ ('Houston'), Дзержински /dzɛrʒinski/ ('Dzerzhinsky'), and Яздя /jadzʲa/, ('Jadzia'). They are, however, normally not considered part of the phonemic inventory of the Bulgarian language. The Bulgarian obstruent consonants are divided into 12 pairs of voiced and voiceless consonants. The only obstruent without a counterpart is the voiceless velar fricative /x/. The voicing contrast is neutralized in word-final position, where all obstruents are voiceless, at least with regard to the official orthoepy of the contemporary Bulgarian spoken language (word-final devoicing is a common feature in Slavic languages); this neutralization is, however, not reflected in the spelling.

Grammar

Bulgarian shares several grammatical innovations with Balkan languages that set it apart from most other Slavic languages, even other South Slavic languages. Among these are a sharp reduction in noun inflections—Bulgarian has lost the noun cases but has developed a definite article, which is suffixed at the end of words. In its verbal system, Bulgarian is set apart from most Slavic languages by the loss of the infinitive, the preservation of most of the complexities of the older conjugation system (including the opposition between aorist and imperfect) and the development of a complex evidential system to distinguish between witnessed and several kinds of non-witnessed information.

Nouns

Bulgarian nouns have the categories grammatical gender, number, case (only vocative) and definiteness. A noun has one of three specific grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). The plural is formed by adding to or replacing the singular ending.

With cardinal numbers and some adverbs, masculine nouns use a separate numerical plural form бройна множествена форма. It is a remnant of the grammatical dual number, which disappeared from the language in the Middle Ages. The numerical form is used in the masculine whenever there is a precise amount of something, regardless of the actual number.

Definiteness is expressed by a definite article which is postfixed to the noun.

Case system

Old Bulgarian had a system of seven cases, but only three remain intact: the accusative, dative, and nominative; and only in personal and some other pronouns.

the accusative and the dative have mostly merged as an oblique case. The distinction between the two cases is preserved.
the genitive had become involved in restructuring already in late Proto-Slavic, where it replaced the accusative of animate masculine singulars. This form, in -а, was not adopted in Standard Bulgarian. However, the grammarians who standardised the language in the 19th century specified an identical form as the incomplete definite article suffix (непълен член), contrasting with the complete definite article in -ът; this distinction was artificially invented and did not occur in any Bulgarian dialect of the time. The incomplete definite article is used with definite masculine singular nouns which are not the subject of a sentence, including as objects of verbs and prepositions. Adnominal uses of the genitive have been lost.

Adjectives

A Bulgarian adjective agrees in gender, number and definiteness with the noun it is appended to and is put usually before it. The comparative and the superlative form are formed analytically.

Pronouns

Bulgarian pronouns vary in gender, number, definiteness and case. The distinguishable types of pronouns include personal, possessive, interrogative, demonstrative, reflexive, summative, negative, indefinite and relative.

Verbs

Bulgarian verbs are the most complicated part of Bulgarian grammar. They are inflected for person, number and sometimes gender. They also have lexical aspect (perfective and imperfective), voice, nine tenses, five moods and six non-finite verbal forms. Bulgarian verbs are divided into three conjugations.

Voice

The voice in Bulgarian verbs is presented by the ending on the past participle; the auxiliary remains съм ("to be"):

Active - ударил съм... - I have hit...
Passive - ударен съм - I have been hit

Mood

Mood in Bulgarian is expressed not through verb endings, but through the auxiliary particles че and да (which both translate as the relative pronoun that). The verbs remain unchanged. Thus:

Indicative - че -
- e.g. знам, че си тук - I know that you are here;
Subjunctive - да -
- e.g. искам да си тук - I want that you are here, I want you to be here

The inferential is formed in exactly the same way as the perfect, but with the omission of the auxiliary:

Perfect - той е бил - he has been
Inferential - той бил - he (reportedly) was

The imperative has its own conjugation - usually by adding -и or -ай to the root of the verb:

e.g. sit - сядам → сядай (imperfective), or седна → седни (perfective).
- Negative instructions - either не сядай or недей да сядаш - "don't sit down".

Word order

Although Bulgarian has almost no noun cases its word order is rather free. It is even freer than the word order of some languages that have cases, for example German. This is due to the agreement between the subject and the verb of a sentence.

Orthography

In 886 AD, the Bulgarian Empire introduced the Glagolitic alphabet which was devised by the Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 850s. The Glagolitic alphabet was gradually superseded in later centuries by the Cyrillic script, developed around the Preslav Literary School, Bulgaria in the 9th century.

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.

With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts.

Text sample

(The Lord's Prayer in Bulgarian)

Отче наш

Отче наш, Който си на небесата!

Да се свети Твоето име,

да дойде Твоето Царство,

да бъде Твоята воля,

както на небето, тъй и на земята;

насъщния ни хляб дай ни днес,

и прости нам дълговете ни,

както и ние прощаваме на нашите длъжници,

и не въведи нас в изкушение,

но избави ни от лукавия;

защото Твое е царството,

и силата, и славата вовеки.

Амин.

Video of a news segment

Sources & Further reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_phonology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_grammar

https://omniglot.com/writing/bulgarian.htm

https://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Bulgarian_language.html

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