Maybe you’re a polyglot looking for a new, interesting, off-the-beaten-track language to learn. Or maybe you’re a language aficionado who allows the outcome of a popular music competition to dictate their holiday and learning plans for the next year. Whichever category you fall into, Bulgarian is well worth a look.
Bulgaria has a lot going for it in climate and culture – it’s not for nothing that the country has featured on numerous place in the sun type programmes. Stunning landscapes, seaside escapes, vibrant cultural life across four very different urban centres – and a particularly interesting language for serious linguists and dabblers alike.
The Strange Case(lessness) of Bulgarian
Bulgarian is a South Slavic language, putting it in the same branch as languages like Croatian and Slovenian. But Bulgarian – and closely related Macedonian – are grammatical outliers. Unlike their South Slavic siblings – and wider Slavic cousins – they’ve pretty much lost all of their noun cases and endings.
Now that feels really unusual if you’ve ever tried learning other languages in that tree. Across all branches, from Polish to Russian to Croatian, noun case morphology is characteristically complex. Learners run a gauntlet of declensions and endings, one of the chief reasons they’re considered ‘hard’ languages.
Not so with Bulgarian. It’s moved from what we call a heavily synthetic language, relying on complex morphology to express relationships between words, to being much more analytic – using standalone units like prepositions to do that work. A case in point is the phrase in London. In Polish, with its rich case system, Londyn changes to its locative with -ie in the phrase w Londynie. In Bulgarian, London is Лондон wherever you place it, giving us simply в Лондон.
Your Features Sound Familiar…
Another lovely curiosity that marks Bulgarian out is the definite article. Slavic languages famously do without any articles on the whole, so no a, an or the. It’s so typically Slavic that you almost do a double-take when you realise the language has one. Not only that, but it’s attached to the end of the noun – something you might know from Scandilangs, but never expected to crop up south of the Vistula. Cinema, for example, is кино (kino) – the cinema is киното (kinoto).
Albanian also happens to have this postnominal definite article, which brings us on to the next point. Bulgarian forms part of the Balkan Sprachbund, a grouping of Indo-European languages that, while not especially closely related, have come to resemble each other, particularly in syntax, through centuries of contact. For example, if you know any Albanian, Modern Greek, or Romanian, you’ll feel strangely at home with Bulgarian and its lack of infinitives. In Bulgarian, you don’t say I want to sing, because there is no ‘to sing’. Instead, you say I want that I sing (Искам да пея), just as in Modern Greek (Θέλω να τραγουδήσω).
Bulgarian Specialities
That’s not to say that Bulgarian doesn’t have its own unique secrets either, though. What it lost in cases, it makes up for in novel verb paradigms. There’s a very special past tense – the renarrated or evidential form – that is used when you are talking about something you didn’t witness.
The Bulgarian renarrated past is based on its perfect tense paradigm. This looks very much like the past tense in Croatian and similar languages, which use the verb ‘to be’ as an auxiliary. For example, we have той е видял куче (toi e vidyal kuche) – he saw a dog: a simple fact. Drop the е and you have the renarrated той видял куче (toi vidyal kuche) – he allegedly saw a dog, but I only know this from hearsay!
Although it’s a novel Slavic innovation in Bulgarian, if you know some German, the idea might be familiar. German does a similar thing by using the subjunctive for reported speech. He said he’s ill becomes er hat gesagt, dass er krank sei – the sei rather than indicative ist indicates that these aren’t your experiences or words, but someone else’s.
Bulgarian Learning Resources
If these tidbits whet your appetite for some български, there are a couple of good places to start. It is off the beaten track as a classroom language, so certainly not as well-served by resources as more mainstream choices.
But the gold standard, as ever, is Routledge. Colloquial Bulgarian is a great starter course, balancing a skills-based communicative approach with a good, solid grammar grounding. You can download all of the audio materials for free at the Routledge website too.
Teach Yourself don’t disappoint, either, with the first Bulgarian title appearing in the 1990s. You can pick the original title up second-hand for under a tenner. Since then, it’s also seen a reissue and rebranding as Complete Bulgarian, with the audio available for free via the Teach Yourself web app.
Finally – and I haven’t tried these, personally, yet – are a pair of titles, Intensive Bulgarian 1 and Intensive Bulgarian 2. These come across as good, academic style ab initio coursebooks. I’ll definitely be dipping into these at some point soon.
If you’ve tried these, or any other Bulgarian learning resources, let us know how you found them in the comments! Or maybe catch me in Sofia next year for a chat about them over an облак (oblak) – Bulgarian’s famous drink of mint liqueur and mastica.
Наздраве!
