BULGA'RIAN LANGUAGE. A language spoken by nearly 5.000,000 people and belonging, with the Church Slavonie, Serbian. and Slove nian, to the southern group of Slavic languages (q.v.). Although it stands with the other lan guages that do not possess the so-called Loll-it/at, it shares with the Russian its absence of syllabic quantity and possesses a peculiar accent of its own. The ancient nasals have become obscure, indefinite sounds. Most striking in morphology is the post-positive use of the article at the end of the noun. Of declension in modern Bulgarian there is but little, the adjectives having lost their degrees of eomparison; in conjugation only the present tense remains, all the other forms being periphrastic. Lexically it shows that it has been much influenced by the Turkish, .11banian, Serbian, and Rumanian languages. In reality there is no Pan-Bulgarian language as such. There is a great variety of dialects. which fall into three groups—Southern Thracian, Rhodo plan. and Western The written lan guage used in antiquity was the Church Slavonic or a dialect. closely resembling, it, and known as
'Old liulgarian."The 'Middle Bulgarian' dates from the Twelfth Century. The Turkish yoke brouLflit a long interruption in the development of the language, which lasted until nearly the Nineteenth Century. Some of the modern writers have used the Church Slavonic forms, while others have preferred the popular spee•]. Of late the majority of writers have been inclined to favor the Danubian dialect for literary purposes. The Cyrillic alphabet is used and the system of spelling has been modeled on the phonetic Serbian spelling of Karajich. The best grammar is that of Kyriak Cankof (Vienna, 1S52), and the best dictionaries are those of Bogorotr, Bulgarian Freneh and French-ltulgarian (Vienna, 1869), and Duvernois, Russian - Bulgarian (Moscow, 1885-S9f. A German-Bulgarian dictionary has been published by Miladinow (Sofia, 1897).