Bulgaria Languages

The Bulgarian language is Bulgaria’s official language. It is a southern Slavic language that is part of the Indo-European group of languages. The language is native to about 83.93% of Bulgarians but is spoken by 88.46% as a first language. Unlike the other South Slavic languages, Bulgarian lacks case declension and verb infinitive. Bulgarian is one of the official languages of the EU.

Bulgarian is spoken by 88.46% of the population as a first language. Turkish is considered native to 9.42%. Romani is native to 4.67%, but only 1.13% of the population use it as their first language. Several other foreign languages including Russian, French, English, and Germany are used 0.87% of the population.

Of all the Slavic languages, Bulgarian is the only one that does not contain the iotated sound /jɛ/ and its variant /ʲɛ except in words sourced from other languages. There are two dialects of Bulgarian: the Western and the Eastern dialects.

There are two minority languages in Bulgaria: Turkish, and Romani. The Turkish language is common among those of Turkish ancestry living in Bulgaria, whose ancestors migrated to Bulgaria in the 14th and early 15th centuries as the Ottoman empire widened. Romani is the second largest minority language. It is common among the Romani people who migrated from Romania in the 13th century. Their numbers increased after the country was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. English, French, Russian, German, and Spanish are some of the foreign languages used in the country.