Bulgarian

How the eastern dialects became the standard

Old Church Slavonic, also called Old Bulgarian, was the literary norm that Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples used from the 9th to the 11th century to translate the Bible from Greek. Middle Bulgarian followed from the 12th to the 15th century and was an administrative language of the Second Bulgarian Empire and of Wallachia and Moldavia; in this period the language lost the Slavic cases but kept a rich verb system, the reverse of what happened in other Slavic languages.

During the 19th-century national revival, more than 25 proposals for a standard appeared between 1835 and 1878. The eastern dialects prevailed. In 1899 the Ministry of Education codified a standard on the Drinov-Ivanchev orthography. The literary language drew heavily on Church Slavonic and, to a degree, on literary Russian, and it shed many Turkish loans.

What happened to the alphabet

The Bulgarian Empire introduced Glagolitic in 886. Cyrillic, developed around the Preslav Literary School in the late 9th century, gradually replaced it. Marin Drinov's alphabet of 32 letters took hold in the 1870s. The spelling reform of 1945 removed yat and big yus, leaving 30 letters. When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, Cyrillic became the union's third official script, after Latin and Greek.

Is Macedonian a separate language

Until the years after the Second World War, Bulgarian and most foreign linguists treated the dialects of Bulgaria, North Macedonia and parts of northern Greece as Bulgarian. Serbian sources called them south Serbian. A separate Macedonian standard was codified in 1945, and Bulgarian and Greek linguists, and some others, still count the Macedonian dialects as part of a wider Bulgarian continuum.

The verb marks where knowledge comes from, with separate evidential forms for what was witnessed, inferred or reported.