Bulgarian

Bulgarian (български език) is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group, spoken by about 12 million people around the world. Bulgarian is mutually intelligible with the Macedonian language.

The development of the Bulgarian language may be divided into four historical periods: Prehistoric (9th century), Old Bulgarian (9th century), Middle Bulgarian (12th to 15th century), and Modern Bulgarian (from the 16th century).

Old Bulgarian was a literary norm of the early southern dialect of the Common Slavic language from which Bulgarian evolved. Middle Bulgarian was a literary norm that evolved from the earlier Old Bulgarian, after major innovations were accepted. It was a language of rich literary activity and the official administration language of the Second Bulgarian Empire. Modern Bulgarian underwent general grammar and syntax changes in the 18th and 19th centuries. The current written Bulgarian language was standardized on the basis of the 19th-century Bulgarian vernacular.

The language is mainly split into two broad dialect areas, based on the different reflexes of the Common Slavic yat vowel (Ѣ): Western dialects (called "hard speech") and Eastern dialects (called "soft speech").

Bulgarian uses the subject-verb-object word order. Bulgarian nouns and adjectives have three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural) identified mostly by their ending. Pronouns, too, have gender and number and retain a more significant part of the case system. Some groups of pronouns use three cases: nominative, accusative, and dative.

Info: Wikipedia