Bulgarian language: general information > Bulgaria

The Bulgarian language is a member of the Slavic language family. Today the Slavic languages are spoken by more than 250 million people in eastern and central Europe, in most of the Balkan Peninsula, and in northern Asia. The modern Slavic languages are divided into three branches: East Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian; South Slavic: eastern group-Bulgarian; western group-Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian; West Slavic: Czech, Slovak, Polish and High and Low Sorbian.

The Bulgarian language is also a member of the larger Indo-European family of languages, which includes the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian), the Germanic languages (German, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish), and others, such as Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Sanskrit, Persian and so on.

Some modern Slavic languages (such as Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Polish) are written in the Latin alphabet, and their speakers are predominantly Roman Catholic. Other Slavic languages, among them the Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian languages, use variations of the Cyrillic alphabet. (The Serbo-Croatian language is called Serbian when written by Serbs in the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian when written by Croats in the Latin alphabet. The Serbs are predominantly Eastern Orthodox and the Croats are mostly Roman Catholic.)