Bulgarian Language

The official language of the Eastern European nation of Bulgaria, the Bulgarian language is primarily spoken by various ethnic Bulgarian populations throughout the Balkan region. It is the first language for roughly eight million people (mostly located within the nation's boundaries) and is thought to be spoken by twelve million people worldwide.

Bulgarian is particularly notable for being the first language to use the Cyrillic alphabet as its written form and was also the first Slavic language to have an attested written history.

History and Classification

The Slavic ethnic group, to which the Bulgarian people belong, is an Indo-European family of cultures who settled in Central and Eastern Europe and North and Central Asia thousands of years ago. This broad categorization of peoples is connected primarily through their shared ethno-linguistic history, from which a communal origin of a common Proto-Slavic language forms an important link.

This early language, of which no known written documentation exists, split off from an earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language base about 1500 BCE. The next two thousand years resulted in a slow development of the Slavic language from a single core tongue into increasingly fractured dialects of Slavic across the continent that were nevertheless still considered to be part of a common Slavic language. Around 1000 CE, however, linguists believe that these dialects had begun to diverge enough to separate them into three primary linguistic branches: East Slavic, Central Slavic, and South Slavic. Bulgarian is classified as a South Slavic language, which is in turn split into two subgroups: the Western group, of which Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian are best known, and the Eastern group, which largely consists of Bulgarian and Macedonian.

The region known as Bulgaria was originally occupied by various tribes from these Slavic groups and an unrelated people known as the Thracians, who spoke their own distinct language—although aspects were absorbed into the South Slavic dialect. In the seventh century, these two groups were later subjugated by a Bulgar people that spoke a Turkic language, though it is now believed that these Bulgar invaders mostly adopted the Slavic language as their own by the ninth century. They nonetheless provided the basis for the country's name as well as entered some individual words into the developing Bulgarian language—primarily terms related to government and administration.

The development of Bulgarian as a distinct language began in the ninth century with the establishment of Old Church Slavic (or, alternately, Old Slavonic or Old Bulgarian). This language traces its origins back to Saints Cyril and Methodius, a pair of Byzantine Greek brothers who were preparing for a mission to Great Moravia, a powerful Slavic state located on the Morava River that borders present-day Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

The brothers created the Glagolitic alphabet in order to provide a translation of the Bible and Christian rites into the Slavic language. This alphabet was based upon the southern dialect of Slavic common to Greece, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, and would later become the primary language of the early Slavic Orthodox Church. The first Slavonic language used in writing, Old Bulgarian was eventually replaced in Great Moravia by Latin in 885 as the official language of the church. The Old Bulgarian language was codified as the official language of the First Bulgarian Empire to unify and strengthen the developing state. From this, scholars created the Cyrillic alphabet using the Glagolitic and Greek alphabets as their basis. The development of these literary systems enabled Bulgaria to become the focal point for Slavic culture in the tenth and eleventh centuries and Old Bulgarian to become the common language of Eastern Europe. The First Bulgarian Empire ended at the hands of the Byzantine Empire in 1014.

The period between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries marked the rise of what linguists call the Middle Bulgarian period, when the language underwent broad changes relatively rapidly. This period of Bulgarian history coincided with the Second Bulgarian Empire—the era of peak Bulgarian influence. Around the end of the fourteenth century, the crumbling Bulgarian Empire was overtaken by the surging Ottoman Empire, which absorbed the remnants of Bulgaria into its ranks.

Linguists mark the start of the sixteenth century as the beginning of the modern era of the Bulgarian language. For a five-century period, the Bulgarian people and their language were under the subjugation of the Ottomans and their Turkic language until the beginning of the Bulgarian Renaissance at the end of the eighteenth century. During these so-called "dark ages," the Bulgarian language was limited in its usage. To redevelop a sense of Bulgarian identity and ethnicity, Bulgarian scholars attempted to restore the Bulgarian national language by developing a new standardized form based upon the normative vernacular versions of the tongue found throughout the country. Bulgaria gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1908, allowing the Bulgarian language the opportunity to develop freely.

Geographic Distribution and Modern Usage

In the late nineteenth century, academics, clergy, and Bulgarian nationalists made early attempts to fashion a modern printed version of the Bulgarian language. Two dialects had formed in the modern era: one in the east, the other in the west. Due to the preponderance of intellectuals in the east, however, the eastern dialect was chosen as the standardized form. The selection of a national dialect helped to bind newly independent Bulgarians into a single unified national entity.

The Bulgarian language is principally used in Bulgaria and among communities of ethnic Bulgarians in other nations. Linguists estimate that roughly twelve million people worldwide speak Bulgarian as either a first or second language, with concentrations of native speakers found in Turkey, Moldova, Macedonia, and Ukraine.

Bibliography

Crampton, R.J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.

Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More than 400 Languages. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Print.

"History of the Bulgarian Language." Europe-Cities. Europe-Cities.com. Web. 5 Sept. 2015. http://europe-cities.com/destinations/bulgaria/history-language/

Hroch, Miroslav. "The Slavic World." Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity: Disciplinary and Regional Perspectives. Ed. Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia Garcia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.

Miller, J. "Bulgarian." Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. Ed. Keith Brown and Sarah Ogilvie. Boston: Elsevier, 2009. Print.