Bulgarian

Where it’s spoken

Bulgarian is the official language of Bulgaria, with minority communities in Greece, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The Bulgarian diaspora in Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK, and the United States numbers over a million. It is closely related to Macedonian — some linguists treat Macedonian as a Bulgarian dialect, though the question is politically charged.

What it sounds like

Unlike most Slavic languages, Bulgarian has largely lost the grammatical case system, instead using prepositions and word order — making its grammar more analytic than Russian or Polish. It has a postposed definite article (knigi-ta, “the book”). Its phonology includes the central vowel ъ (a schwa).

How it’s written

Bulgarian uses 30 Cyrillic letters. The script’s Bulgarian origins are significant: the Cyrillic alphabet was developed in 9th-century Bulgaria by disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and Bulgaria is sometimes called the “Cradle of Slavic Letters.”

History

Old Bulgarian — the language of the First Bulgarian Empire — is essentially identical to Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language used across the Orthodox Slavic world. Modern Bulgarian was standardized in the 19th century during the National Revival.