The beginnings of the Bulgarian literary language came about almost by chance: in the 9th century, the ruler of Moravia (today a part of the Czech Republic) wanted to counter the influence of German missionaries with an evangelization effort in the native Slav language of his subjects. He turned to the Byzantine scholars Cyril and Methodius, who created a literary language based on the speech of their native Saloniki. The planned missionary effort in Moravia never took off, but the newly created literary language became a great sucess elsewhere, not only as a literary and administrative language in the Bulgarian state, but also as a liturgical language for the rest of the Orthodox Slavs. In this latter function it is often referred to as Church Slavonic. The literary tradition in Bulgaria itself was almost completely brought to an end by Ottoman occupation, from the end of the 14th century. Not until the 19th century do we again see an established, codified literary New Bulgarian in use.

Today, Bulgarian is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria, which has a population of 8.3 million (1993 figure). Bulgarian speakers are also found in the neighboring countries Ð especially in Turkey, as a result of recent immigration Ð and in Ukraine and Moldova.

Bulgarian has several features in its grammar that set it apart from the other Slavonic languages: a definite article, the loss of case declension in nouns and adjectives, the loss of the infinitive, and a richly developed verbal system are some of them.

This handbook aims to give learners of Bulgarian a basic description of the language as it is written and spoken today. Archaic constructions are mentioned only if they are reasonably frequent as a stylistic variant, while downright obsolete constructions are ignored. Derivational morphology (word-formation) is included only to a very small extent Ð the results of wordformation can usually be found in a dictionary, but the results of the patterns of inflectional morphology (noun inflection, verb declension) cannot.

Most examples are taken or adapted from the Bulgarian press, some are from textbooks and literature, and all are from recent texts. All Bulgarian examples are translated. The translations are meant to be idiomatic, not literal.

Stress is indicated throughout, also on monosyllabic words, to distinguish them from unaccented clitics. Stress is always indicated by an acute accent (‡). Note particularly that the unstressed feminine dative personal pronoun to her is written with a grave accent (as is common also in standard orthography), and the stressed adverb ’ also with an acute accent.

In the Bulgarian examples, the words that illustrate the topic under discussion are italicized. Boldface in the examples is used for secondary emphasis. The following special symbols are used:

( ! ) introduces an example sentence or expression to illustrate the point discussed in the preceding pragraph.

{ } curly braces indicate that any one of the elements inside the braces could be used: {a, no}.

[ ] square brackets are used for phonetic transcription. In the translation of examples, they enclose words that have been added to make the translation more literal.

/ / slashes are used for phonemic transcription.

' ' single quotes are used for elements of meaning that are not translatable in the forms of English words: '1st person singular'

( * ) an asterisk is used to indicate an ungrammatical form. Italics are used for translations within the text itself.


Many thanks are due to the persons who kindly read and commented upon earlier drafts of this grammar, especially Arne Hult and his students, Ruselina Nicolova, Jovka Ti£eva, and Oyvin Yri.

Norwegian educators sometimes add a whimsical twist to the proverb "man lrer s lenge man lever" one learns as long as one lives by saying "man lrer s lenge man har elever" one learns as long as one has students. This is very true. I dedicate this book to my students. Eiksmarka, July 1999.

Kjetil Ra Hauge