The archive

Bulgarian

Български

The Slavic language that dropped the cases

It threw out the case system every other Slavic language guards, and grew a definite article instead.

FamilyProto-Indo-European › Balto-Slavic › Slavic › South Slavic › Bulgarian
ScriptCyrillic
Speakers8M 7M native · 1M second
Weeks to a working level44 Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
The first hundred words cover52.2% and the first thousand 74.0%
What sets it apart
  • Nouns lost their cases, which is almost unheard of in Slavic. Word order and prepositions do the work now.
  • The article is glued to the end of the noun: град city, градът the city.
  • It has a mood for hearsay. The verb form itself tells you whether you saw the thing or were told about it, and you cannot avoid choosing.
  • There is no infinitive. Where English says I want to go, Bulgarian says the equivalent of I want that I go.
  • Cyrillic was assembled here in the ninth century, in the first Bulgarian empire, and travelled outwards from there.
What it opens

The Slavic language that dropped its cases and grew articles instead, glued to the end of the noun. Slavic vocabulary with Balkan machinery: a linguist's puzzle you can actually speak. Cheapest EU country to live in, mountains and sea two hours apart, and choirs whose harmonies NASA put on the Voyager record.

Next to its neighbours

Where Bulgarian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Bulgarian vs Bosnian → Bulgarian vs Serbian → Bulgarian vs Croatian →