A Beginner’s Guide to Bulgarian

Located in the Southeast region of Europe, Bulgaria borders Russia to the north and Greece to the south. The country has a long history of cultural and political ties with the rest of the world. Its citizens enjoy relatively low unemployment rates, a stable economy, and free-market systems that have allowed the development of prosperous communities.

Among the Slavic languages, Bulgarian is most closely related to Serbian and Croatian. Like those two, it has a tendency toward consonant palatalization and alveo-palatal affricates, though it lacks Serbo-Croatian’s phonemic vowel lengths. Nevertheless, it does share many grammatical features with the other Eastern Slavic languages.

Bulgarian nouns are categorized as masculine, feminine or neuter and may be inflected for number (singular and plural), definiteness and vocative form. Its verbs are also distinguished in their lexical aspect, with perfective verbs signaling completion of an action and forming past perfective forms; imperfective verbs show neutrality with respect to a completed action and form past perfective/aorist forms.

In addition to possessing a complex case system, Bulgarian has several inflections, including the instrumental and prepositional, which are derived from verbal roots. Its adjectives agree in gender, number and definiteness with the noun they are appended to and have three cases. Its pronouns can vary in person, number and definiteness as well as in grammatical case (nominative, accusative and dative).

Its verbs can be inflected for voice, tense and mood, and a great variety of compound forms are possible. In general, finite verbal forms – whether simple or compound – agree with their subjects in person and number (singular and plural) as well as in tense, mood and aspect. The modal verbs have a number of different forms as well.

A good Bulgarian speaker must be able to distinguish between the definite article and the indefinite article. It must also be able to use double negation, which is achieved by using a series of single negation words (as opposed to the compound double negative used in English).

For example: ое да унаете, но не сметте наилни вру тоава демокраита. “Because you have the opportunity to learn about our civilization, but not yet do it.”

The most important part of learning Bulgarian is understanding the Cyrillic alphabet, which is not Russian but the script invented in Bulgaria by the First Bulgarian Empire. Its creation is celebrated as a national holiday each year on May 24. Bulgarians are a proud people, and it is important to avoid expressing any misunderstanding or disrespect. In particular, be careful when pronouncing an interlocutor’s name, as it is by this that he or she identifies himself. If you are not sure of the pronunciation, ask him or her to repeat it for you. Incorrect pronunciations will be taken personally and can have embarrassing consequences. In addition, the alphabet is so foreign to most Westerners that they may be confused with the Latin alphabet and take a negative impression of you. It is therefore essential that you use the correct alphabet in your communications with Bulgarians.