Bulgaria is a country in eastern Europe and western Asia, situated at the crossroads of the Balkans. Its territory straddles the rivers Danube and Rhodopes, with an area of over 50,000 square kilometers (about 17,000 square miles).
The population of Bulgaria is ethnically divided among several groups of people, including Bulgars, Croats, Serbs, Roma, Turks, and Gypsies. Ethnic Bulgarians are a mixed group of Bulgars and Slavs, and the majority of them speak Bulgarian, which is part of the South Slavic language family.
A large percentage of the Bulgarian population is educated, with most students attending state-supported schools and colleges. Higher education in many fields, including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, is available at a number of universities.
Religion is a major part of the Bulgarian culture, with Orthodox Christianity enshrined in the constitution and having a significant influence on political and social life. Although the state regulated religious affairs during the socialist era, it has diminished its role since the fall of state socialism. The state has a role in regulating the activity of foreign-based churches and sects; however, this is generally done at the local level.
The country’s official language is Bulgarian, a South Slavic language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is closely related to Macedonian and Serbian and is mutually intelligible with all these languages, as well as with Russian, Greek, and Turkish.
Bulgarian is the primary language of instruction at all levels of schooling, and it is also widely used in television and the Internet. A large percentage of the population is literate in Bulgarian, with over half speaking it at home.
Language Variations
Bulgarian is a member of the Slavic languages group and is the most common language spoken in the region, with over 20 million speakers. It is a sister language to Serbian and has a close relationship with Slovenian, Sebo-Croatian and Macedonian.
Grammar
Bulgarian has an extensive system of declension, which included seven grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative, instrumental and vocative; though Bulgarian lost the old case system in the nineteenth century, it has retained the forms of some personal pronouns that were used under the old system. As a result, some nouns in the indirect cases became fossilized and were reanalyzed as other parts of speech; likewise, some pronouns in the direct case have been changed to a nominative form.
Inflectional Forms
Bulgarian inflects verbs for a variety of purposes, notably to form different meanings. The verbs are formed in a wide range of cases, with a particular preference for the indicative and conditional forms. A number of other inflectional forms are also used, especially when describing physical and emotional states.
Infinitives and auxiliary verbs are also used in Bulgarian. The adverbs, adverbial phrases, and imperatives are also inflected; the former is usually used with a negative sense and the latter with an emphatic one.
Nouns, adjectives and verbs:
There are six vowels in Bulgarian; unstressed vowels tend to be shorter than stressed ones. The lexicon is mostly composed of words from other Slavic languages, but some vocabulary is still borrowed from other Indo-European languages.