| Group | Slavic (with Russian, Polish etc.), Southern branch (with Macedonian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian) |
| Geography | Apart from Bulgaria, the speakers of the language live also in Macedonia, Ukraine, Romania and Greece. The total number of speakers reaches 9 million people. Two main groups of dialects exist: eastern and western, the differences between them are significant. |
| History | Bulgarian as a literature language was shaped only in the 19th century; before that, all books were written in the Old Church Slavonic tongue, the official language of the Orthodox Church. The inscriptions made in the 10th century and later, before the Ottoman conquest, are quite similar to both Bulgarian and Old Church Slavonic. |
| Phonetics | Bulgarian uses sounds [št] and [žd] as the reflections of the Common Slavic *tj, *dj. One of the unique Bulgarian vowels is its short middle vocal sound [ŭ] which is used in the positions where Russian has its "weak" [o]. Slavic intonations and long vowels were lost, unlike in Slovene or Serbo-Croatian. |
| Nominal Morphology | Bulgarian is one of the languages of the Balkan Unity sharing certain grammar features with Greek, Albanian, and Romanian: it has lost the infinitive, completely lost the noun declension, but developed the postpositive article -t, -ta, -to. |
| Verbal Morphology | Archaic verb tenses, the aorist and the imperfect, are preserved in Bulgarian. The future tense is formed analytically, with the particle šče. The specific narrative mood is used when reelling someone's words. |
| Lexicon | A lot of words in Bulgarian were borrowed from Greek; but the basis remains fully Slavic. |
| Writing | Cyrillic alphabet |
| Close Contacts | Greek, Turkish, English influenced the language in certain periods of time. The closest neighbour is Macedonian which is sometimes considered as the dialect of Bulgarian. |
| Sample | Na drugija den, v dva časa, Elena sedeše v gradinata pred edna
malka baračka, deto živeexa dve malki kučenca. Gradinarjat gi nameri
zaxvŭrleni pod sajvana i gi donese na gospožicata, za kojato peračkite
mu kazaxa, če tja prigležda vsjakakvi zverove i životni.
The following day, at 2 o'clock, Elena was sitting in the garden in front of a small corner where she brought up two mongrel puppies. The gardener found them abandoned near the fence and broght them to the mistresse, for the laundresses told him that she likes every beast and animal. (I.Turgenev, Nakanune.) |
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