Bulgarian is the official language of Bulgaria, and is also spoken in parts of Moldova, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, and Greek. Approximately 10 million people speak Bulgarian worldwide.
Bulgarian is a member of the South Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is closely related to Macedonian and more distantly connected to Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovene.
Of all the Slavic languages, Bulgarian was the first to be written down. The earliest writings, which date from the 9th century, used a form of the Gagolitic script. Over the next few centuries, that script was gradually replaced by the a form of the Cyrillic alphabet. Different versions of this alphabet came into use over time, some with as few as 28 letters and some with as many as 40.
The modern Bulgarian alphabet has 30 letters. It is similar but not quite identical to the Russian alphabet, which contains three additional letters. Some of the Bulgarian letters will look and sound familiar to English speakers because they bear a resemblance to English letters. Others are different in their form and/or pronunciation. Bulgarian letters have capital and lowercase forms, and Bulgarian is written from left to right, just like English.
The bulk of everyday Bulgarian vocabulary consists of words descended from the original Old Bulgarian and Middle Bulgarian languages. Early borrowings from Latin and Greek also became incorporated into the language, as did later words from Turkish, French, and Russian, among other languages. Most recently, English borrowings have become common, particularly in the fields of technology, sports, and popular culture.
The Bulgarian language does not, however, retain much vocabulary from the original language of the Bolgars who gave the region its name. After the Bolgar people adopted a local Slavic language, their own unrelated language fell out of use in the area. Only a handful of Bolgar words still exist in modern Bulgarian.
Bulgarian grammar is similar to that of several other Slavic languages, particularly Macedonian. All Bulgarian nouns are classified as one of three genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter. Nouns also have singular and plural forms. Bulgarian adjectives come before nouns and change form to match the noun the modify. Definite articles are either attached to the end of the noun they modify or to the end of the first adjective in a noun phrase. The definite articles also match the gender and number of the noun.
Bulgarian verbs are conjugated to show tense, mood, and aspect. They also agree with the subject of the sentence in person and number. Verb tenses which use participles must also agree in gender with the subject. It is also interesting to note that Bulgarian verbs do not have separate infinitive forms; the concept of an infinitive is expressed with a preposition meaning "to" and the present subjunctive tense.
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