Bulgarian

Bulgarian is an Eastern South Slavic language of the eastern Balkans, descended from Slavs who settled there in the sixth century. It was the first Slavic language committed to writing: in the 860s Saints Cyril and Methodius translated Greek liturgy into the Slavic tongue, and in 886 the Bulgarian Empire adopted their Glagolitic alphabet, which the Preslav Literary School soon replaced with Cyrillic.

This literary norm, called Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian, gave way between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries to Middle Bulgarian, the administrative language of the Second Bulgarian Empire.

Under Ottoman rule Bulgarian took in many Turkish words, while the vernacular damaskin texts bridged the gap to modern Bulgarian. During the nineteenth-century national revival, scholars drafted competing grammars and orthographies, and from 1835 proposals for a standard language multiplied.