Tourists from countries love to fly on vacation to warm Bulgaria. Some even buy real estate there, considering living conditions much higher than in the Russian Federation. When you are going to fly on vacation, you need to consider what language is spoken language in Bulgaria and can you speak it? Let’s look at this issue more closely.
Official language in Bulgaria
Bulgarian is considered to be the national language of the state. This spoken language part of the South Slavic group, which belongs to the Indo-European language family. The Cyrillic alphabet is used here as a letter.
The Bulgarian language in terms of vocabulary and phonetics is too reminiscent of the Macedonian language. In addition, the Bulgarian language will be understood by Serbs and Croats.
A large number of lexical forms were borrowed from Russian, Greek and Turkish. It was the latter that had a significant impact on the formation of the grammar of the Bulgarian language.
Bulgarians have two key dialect variants of their own language. It is usually divided according to the area in which it is used.
This is east and west. In addition, historically established dialects are in use. The media and national formations advocate that the language be homogenized. In other words, it has become more homogeneous, especially when it comes to the city.
So, residents who live in Bulgaria and are part of Turkish communities usually speak Turkish. It belongs to the Turko-Altaic spoken language family. The gypsies conduct a dialogue in the Romance (Gypsy) language, which belongs to the Indian branch of the Indo-European group.
The Bulgarian language is used as a “communication” with the authorities of the country, as well as in the course of solving commercial problems. In addition, the Bulgarian language is used for teaching in schools and higher education institutions.
At the same time, national minorities are dissatisfied with this fact, so they have the opportunity to get an education in the local dialect.
All media that operate on the territory of the country use only the Bulgarian language in their work.
At the same time, the “dialogue” is conducted in Turkish Language on the radio and in print media. It should be understood that if you come to Bulgaria, you will have to speak either Bulgarian or English.
Bulgarian Slavic Languages
The Bulgarian alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet. The Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius translated liturgical books from greek language into Slavonic in the ninth century, using the alphabet created by them ─ Glagolitic alphabet. The Glagolitic alphabet was gradually replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet, an alphabet developed at the beginning of the tenth century in Bulgaria by the disciples of Cyril and Methodius and named the Cyrillic alphabet in honor of Cyril. The Cyrillic alphabet is the basis of modern alphabets of other slavic languages like, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and a number of other languages.
Bulgarian is one of the languages of the Slavic group that enters the Indo-European language family. The Slavic group is divided into three sections:
- East Slavic: includes Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.
- West Slavic: includes Polish, Czech and Slovak.
- South Slavic: includes Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian…. , but Bulgarian is the most important and prominent language of this group.
The languages of the Slavic group all emerged from a mother tongue, the ancient Slavic language of the sixth and seventh centuries AD. The oldest manuscripts written in ancient Bulgarian date back to the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries AD.
Bulgarian has become a national language of Bulgarians since it became independent from the Greek and Latin languages that were prevalent in ancient culture, along the spot ruled by the Roman and Byzantine Pratories. This was done after the Bulgarians united their national entity and established a state in which the Slavic element was dominant; from there came the Slavic roots of the Bulgarian language.
The Bulgarian language has linguistic features that combine it with the rest of the Slavic languages to put it in a confrontation with West Slavic and East Slavic, including phonetic features such as the presence of two marked letters in the Bulgarian language, the task of the first is to thin the silent before it and the task of the second is to amplify the silent before it, as well as the presence of complex phonetic units such as dj and tj and the presence of some weak and reduced vowels The Bulgarian language, unlike many Slavic languages such as Russian, amplifies the silent before the e and i fasts, and is also distinguished by its tone, which is a dynamic and powerful expiratory kinetic tone corresponding to the tonal tone in other Slavic languages.
Foreign languages in Bulgaria
Regular translations and printing in Bulgarian of highly specialized publications rarely pay off economically. In order to keep up with the most modern achievements of world science and culture, Bulgarian intellectuals and specialists know at least one foreign language, often – two or more.
Knowledge of at least one foreign language has always been a prerequisite for appointment to a research or responsible managerial position. in Bulgaria.
Russian language in Bulgaria
From 1946 to 1989, the most significant foreign language in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria was Russian.
It was compulsorily studied from the 3rd to the 8th grade in basic schools and for at least two years in secondary schools.
Today, almost all Bulgarians born before 1975 understand almost everything in Russian, although only graduates of higher and elite secondary schools can freely explain.
The surge of anti-Soviet sentiments in the 90s of the last century was not developed in Bulgaria. Schools with in-depth teaching of the Russian language have been preserved in the country.
English in Bulgaria
After November 10, 1989 (the collapse of socialism in the country) and especially after Bulgaria’s accession to NATO (April 20, 2004) and the EU (January 1) 2007) the most common foreign language in the country is English.
Minority languages in Bulgaria
Minorities and Indigenous Peoples Major languages: Bulgarian, Turkish, Romani language. According to the 2011 census, 85.2 percent spoke Bulgarian as their mother tongue, 9.1 percent Turkish, and 4.2 percent were Roma.
Bulgarian Sign Language
Bulgarian Sign Language (in Bulgarian: “Български Ёцемимін Ёzik (BJE)”) is the language or possibly the languages of the deaf community in Bulgaria.
Primary schools were established for the deaf. Russian Sign Language was introduced in 1910 and allowed in classes in 1945, and Wittmann (1991) classifies it as a descendant of Russian Sign Language. However, Bickford (2005) found that the Bulgarian sign formed a cluster with the Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish sign. The language in the classroom is different from that spoken by adults outside of school, and it is unclear whether Wittmann and Bickford looked at the same language; also, if one of them comes from a Russian sign word, whether it is a dialect or creolized to form a new language.
History of the Bulgarian language
- The development of the Bulgarian language can be divided into several periods.
The prehistoric period between the Solav migration to the eastern Balkans and the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to Great Moravia in 860 and the transformation of the language is now extinct to the Bulgarian language. - Ancient Bulgarian (from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, also referred to as the “Old Slavic Church”) – a literary base for the early Southern dialect of the common Slavic language from which Bulgarian developed. Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples used this criterion when translating the Bible and other liturgical literature from Greek to Slavic.
Central Bulgarian (twelfth to fifteenth centuries) – a literary base that evolved from ancient Bulgarian after major innovations. The language of rich literary activity, served as the official management language of the Second Bulgarian Empire.
Modern Bulgarian dates back to the sixteenth century and beyond, undergoing general grammatical and grammatical changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Bulgarian language currently written on the basis of the Bulgarian language was standardized in the nineteenth century slang. The historical development of the Bulgarian language can be described as a transition from a highly ranked synthetic language (ancient Bulgarian) to a typical analytic language (modern Bulgarian) with Central Bulgarian as a midpoint in this transformation. - As a result of the linguistic influence on the Bulgarian language, the result of the presence of Iranian words in modern Bulgarian, and especially the main factor in the linguistic influence is the Ottoman Trika.
