Bulgarian language (бъ́лгарски ези́к) is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria (about 6.5 million people). Outside of Bulgaria, this language is spoken by minorities in Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Turkey, Greece, Spain, etc. In Bulgaria, after the end of the socialist era, a mass outflow of the population abroad began in 1990. The emigration process intensified after Bulgaria joined the European Union, the abolition of visas and access to the European labor market. Since there are Bulgarian diasporas in many countries around the world, the total number of people speaking Bulgarian is, according to the latest estimates, about 15 million people.
Bulgarian belongs to the Slavic languages of the southern group. The South Slavic group includes Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Slovenian. Knowing Bulgarian will make it easier and faster to master other languages of this group.
The Bulgarian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet. The Bulgarian alphabet consists of 30 letters and visually almost completely coincides with the Russian alphabet (with the exception of three letters - Bulgarian does not have the letters "ё", "ы", "э"). But some of the letters of the Bulgarian alphabet do not convey the same sounds as in the Russian alphabet. For example, the Bulgarian letter "щ" is read as / шт/, the letter "е" is read approximately like the Russian /э/, and the letter "ъ" does not indicate the hardness of the preceding consonant sound, like the "hard sign" in Russian, but conveys a specific vowel sound in Bulgarian.
In modern Bulgarian, nouns have lost their case declension, which is why Bulgarian is considered an analytical language. However, personal pronouns have retained their declension in two cases (accusative and dative). In addition, pronouns have full and short forms. Nouns are linked to other words in a sentence using prepositions or a specific word order. Bulgarian has a definite article as a suffix that is added to a noun or adjective, which is why a distinction is made between the general form of a noun (without such a suffix) and the member form (with a suffix).
Since both Russian and Bulgarian have 10 parts of speech, it is convenient to compare the languages by each part of speech (noun, adjective, verb, etc.). Thanks to this approach, Russian speaking students can master the Bulgarian language 3 times faster (in about 30 days).
In lexical terms, Bulgarian is close to Church Slavonic, but with a significant presence of loanwords from Turkish, Greek and Russian.
We analyzed contemporary Bulgarian literature to obtain a list of 1,000 most frequently used words. As a result of this analysis, it was found that 210 words from this list completely coincide with words in Russian (in spelling, stress, and meaning), and 310 words differ slightly in spelling. This ratio explains the fairly good understanding of Bulgarian texts by native Russian speakers, since knowledge of the 1,000 most frequently used words allows one to understand the meaning of the text by 75%.