Bulgarian · Български

About Bulgarian

Language family

Indo-European, South Slavic

Where it's spoken

Bulgaria

Speakers

roughly 8 million speakers

Bulgarian's ancestor, Old Church Slavonic, was the language into which the 9th-century missionaries Cyril and Methodius translated Christian texts for the Slavic world, and the Cyrillic alphabet developed by their followers takes its name from Cyril. Modern Bulgarian broke away from the case system most other Slavic languages kept, instead using articles and prepositions the way Romance languages do — an unusual shift for a Slavic language. Its closest living relative, Macedonian, is close enough that the two are often mutually intelligible.