Bulgarian Language

Bulgarian Language, the national language of Bulgaria, also spoken in Moldova, Turkey, Greece, Romania, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Bulgarian and the closely related Macedonian language form the eastern group in the southern branch of the modern Slavic languages and are written in the Cyrillic alphabet. They are outstanding among Slavic languages in having eliminated nearly all noun inflections, often using prepositional phrases instead. They have also taken on several regional non-Slavic traits, notably the use of a definite article and its placement after the noun and the use of a clause where other Slavic languages use an infinitive. Old Bulgarian (9th-11th century) is believed to be essentially the same as the earliest form of Old Church Slavonic (10th-11th century), the medieval Macedonian dialect that became the liturgical language of the Eastern Orthodox Church and for which the Cyrillic alphabet was devised. Middle Bulgarian dates from the 12th century and Modern Bulgarian from after the 16th century. The local form of Church Slavonic remained the Bulgarian literary language until a literary language based on modern speech was adopted in the 19th century. Bulgarian has absorbed loanwords mainly from Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Turkish. It has two principal dialect groups, eastern (the basis of the literary language) and western. See also Bulgarian Literature.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.