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Sample Bulgarian Words

Bulgarian Language, official language of Bulgaria, spoken by about 8.5 million inhabitants of the country. Together with the closely related Macedonian language, Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian, it forms the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, as do the Russian, Serbian, and Macedonian languages.

The history of the Bulgarian language is divided into three periods: old, middle, and modern. The Old Bulgarian Period lasted from the 9th century through the 11th century, and the texts from this period make up the bulk of the Old Church Slavonic texts. The Middle Bulgarian Period lasted from the 12th century through the 14th century. The Modern Bulgarian Period started in the 15th century, but the modern literary language, which is quite different from Old Bulgarian, formed only during the 19th century. Modern Bulgarian's two major dialect groups are the eastern and western dialects, each subdivided into north and south varieties. The modern literary language is based primarily on the northeastern dialects.

Bulgarian and the closely related Macedonian language have several features that make them unique among the Slavic languages. They both have a definite article that comes after the noun (as do the Scandinavian Germanic languages)-for example, in Bulgarian: zhena (woman) and zhenata (the woman). They have both lost the case system that existed in Common Slavic, the language from which all Slavic languages descended. In both languages, as in English, prepositions have replaced cases as a way of showing the grammatical relationships between different parts of a sentence-for example, in Bulgarian: knigata za zhenata (the book about the woman) and dadoh knigata na zhenata (I gave the book to the woman). Both languages, however, have preserved the Common Slavic vocative form. Bulgarian verbs have a large variety of tenses, including present, future, future perfect, future in the past, perfect, pluperfect, imperfect, and aorist, in addition to an imperative, a verbal adverb, and various participles. The infinitive form of the verb has been lost, and is similar to English, in how we just add to to the beginning of the verb, Bulgarian adds da [ d` ]. Both languages have a special set of verb forms that indicate that an event has not been witnessed or is not vouched for-for example, in Bulgarian: Ivan napravi tova (Ivan did that, and I witnessed it or vouch for the truth of the statement) and Ivan napravil tova (Ivan is alleged to have done that, but I did not witness the act or do not want to vouch for the truthfulness of the statement). Another set of verb forms in each language indicate disbelief or doubt-for example, in Bulgarian: Ivan bil napravil tova (Ivan is supposed to have done that, but I doubt it).