Origins
 
The Bulgarian language is a Slavic language. It’s classified by linguists to the South Slavic languages and is spoken mainly on the Balkans. Three main factors were crucial for the formation of the Bulgarian language – the substrates (Slavic tribal languages and the language of the Thracian tribes, which lived on the territory of Bulgaria before the Slavs) and the adstrat – the Bulgarians who invaded the Balkan Peninsula in the 7th Century and founded the state. Bulgarian was later influenced by Turkish and Russian.

Official Language

Bulgarian is the official language in the Republic of Bulgaria. With the accession of Bulgaria to the EU in 2007, it became official for the Union, thus introducing the Cyrillic alphabet as the third official alphabet in the Union. Bulgarian is also spoken in Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, Greece, Turkey and by emigrant groups all over the world.

Varieties

The Bulgarian language has two major variety groups – the Eastern and the Western norm, differentiated by the process of palatalization of consonants. Official Bulgarian was based on the Eastern norm. Significant varieties are also detected in the groups of ethnic Bulgarians, who were formed in Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Romania and Greece due to historical and political reasons. They speak a Bulgarian language which has been strongly influenced by the official languages in these countries, but also by the separation from the mother-state, thus resulting in a somewhat archaic variety of modern Bulgarian.

Brief History

Officially, the development of the Bulgarian language is divided into four major periods.

The prehistoric period encompasses the centuries from the invasion of the Slavic tribes to the Balkans to the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet. This first period is the time when Slavic languages absorbed the local Thracian ones to form a hybrid. Later, the Bulgarians came from Asia after the collapse of the Bulgarian Empire, and established a state on the Balkans co-living with the Slavic tribes. Thus a new language was formed, based on Slavic and influenced by Bulgarian. The language, the state and its official terms were taken from Bulgarian, and most of the remaining vocabulary from Slavic.

The second period, called Old Bulgarian, is largely known as Old Church Slavic – the language from which the main Slavic languages evolved, including modern Bulgarian. The key event for this period was the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet. It was ordered by the Bulgarian King, who aimed to unify its growing kingdom by strengthening the state. At that time, Christianity had just become the one official religion (9th Century). First, the Glagollitic alphabet was developed by the saint brothers Cyril and Methodius to correspond to the phonetics of Bulgarian. Later on, the Cyrillic was developed by their disciples, based on both the Glagollitic and Greek alphabets.