ABSTRACT

The ancient Bulgars were a Turkic people speaking a language classified by Baskakov as Western Hunnic; its congener, still spoken today, is Chuvash (see Turkic Languages). The Bulgars enter history in the seventh century AD, when they moved westwards from the Crimea area, and settled to the south of the Danube, in the Balkan peninsula. Here, they gradually merged with the Slav population already established along the Black Sea coast, and even adopted the local Slavonic language. O f the original Bulgar(ian) language, only the name remains. The language now known as Bulgarian forms, together with M acedo­ nian, the eastern branch of South Slavonic. It is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria where it is spoken by over 8 million people. (For the ‘Old Bulgarian’ literary language, see Old Church Slavonic in Campbell 1991.) Through the Middle Bulgarian period (twelfth to fifteenth centuries) and again under Turkish suzerainty from the fifteenth century onwards, Bulgarian was a spoken language only, a kind of demotic accompanying the Church Slavonic literary language. By the eighteenth century it had deviated more than any other Slavonic tongue from the common Slavonic norm. The declension of the noun had disappeared, an affixed definite article had been introduced, and the infini­ tive had been replaced by a construction with the particle da plus a finite form of the verb (these are areal features, cf. Tosk Albanian, Romanian, Serbian, and, in part, Greek). In addition, Bulgarian has developed the preizkazano naklonenie, a set of inferential tenses which has no parallel in other European languages (but cf. Turkic Languages).