BULGARIAN LANGUAGE

Bulgarian Bulgarski ezik South Slavic language written in the Cyrillic alphabet and spoken in Bulgaria and parts of Greece, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. Together with Macedonian, with which it is most closely related, Bulgarian contrasts sharply with the other Slavic languages in its almost complete loss of case declension in the noun and in its use of certain grammatical features found in Balkan languages that belong to other language families. For example, the definite article is placed after the noun (e.g., masa table, masata the table), as in Albanian and Romanian, and the infinitive form of the verb is replaced with a clause, as in modern Greek, Albanian, and Romanian. The literary language has free stress accent (with consequent reductions of unstressed vowels) that has replaced an earlier pitch accent (i.e., tone). The history of Bulgarian is divided into three periods: (1) Old Bulgarian, 9th11th century; (2) Middle Bulgarian, 12th16th century; and (3) Modern Bulgarian, from the 16th century to the present. Old Bulgarian, the language of the Macedonian Slavs of the 10th and 11th centuries, was the first Slavic literary language; it developed in the Macedonian part of Bulgaria after St. Clement, a pupil and disciple of the Slavic missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius, took refuge there after having been driven out of Moravia. The loss of cases in the noun, as well as many other linguistic changes, took place during the Middle Bulgarian period, which began with the subjugation of Bulgaria by the Byzantine Empire. The modern Bulgarian written language, which stems from the language of the widely read almanacs of the 16th century, did not become fully established until the 19th century; its vocabulary contains a sizable number of Russian and Church Slavonic loanwords, although a purist movement during the period between World Wars I and II attempted to replace these words and loanwords from other languages with native Bulgarian words.