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Bulgarian

Bulgarian belongs to the Southern Slavic family of languages. It is mostly spoken in Bulgaria, serving as the country’s official language, but is also spoken in about 70 other countries around the world, with approximately 12 million speakers in total. Bulgarian is one of the official languages of the European Union and thanks to Bulgaria, the EU now has three official alphabets (Cyrillic, Latin and Greek). Bulgarian is also the first Slavic language that appeared in written form: documents written in Glagolitic alphabet, which is the oldest known Slavic alphabet, are dating to the 9th century. Although Glagolitic alphabet was later replaced with Cyrillic letters, the Bulgarian language itself could be considered the “original” Slavic language.

Bulgarian language has several features distinguishing it from other Slavic languages, such as lack of verb infinitives, no case declension and addition of suffixed definite article. Bulgarian should not be confused with Bulgar (also known as Bolğar or Bulghar), which is an extinct language that was spoken until the 10^th century in parts of Russia and even reached today’s Italy and Romania. Although the language of the Bulgar tribes is dead, some features of this language survived in Bulgarian.

Until the end of World War II, most linguists considered the Macedonian language to be a Bulgarian dialect. In fact, these languages are so similar that both could be considered two dialects of one language. However, there are several additional and slightly different dialects spoken from Bulgaria through Macedonia and all the way to Northern Greece.