Bulgarians

Bulgarians

българи balgari
Total population
c. 7-8 million[1][2][3]
Regions with significant populations
Bulgaria 5,500,000 (2021)
Germany	410,885[

Bulgarians are a South Slavic^[4][5][6] people from southeast Europe. There are around 7.3 million Bulgarian nationals.^[7] The Bulgarians speak the Bulgarian language and most of them live in Bulgaria. There is also a large diaspora of Bulgarians in Germany, Ukraine, Spain, UK and USA.

Culture

Language

The Bulgarian language is a South Slavic language that is very similar to the Macedonian language. It is spoken by around 9 million people.^[8][9] There are some notable differences in the Bulgarian language that set it apart from other Slavic languages. For example, Bulgarian lost almost all of the noun cases. The language also developed a definite article.

The Bulgarian language is written with the Cyrillic script. The Cyrillic script was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire,^[10] and is now used in 12 other languages.

Religion

Bulgarian Orthodoxy has been the prominent religion in Bulgaria since 870 AD. There are also a small amount of Bulgarians who converted to Islam during Ottoman rule.^[11]

Bulgarian folk dancers in a national costume.

References

1. Danver, Steven L. (2015-03-10). Native Bulgarian people's of the World. Routledge. ISBN 9781317464006. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
2. Cole, Jeffrey E. (2011-05-25). Ethnic Groups of Europe: An Encyclopedia. Abc-Clio. ISBN 9781598843033. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
3. Conference, Foundation for Endangered Languages; Argenter, Joan A.; McKenna Brown, R. (2004). On the Margins of Nations. Institut d'Estudis Catalans. ISBN 9780953824861. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
4. Slavs
5. Minahan, James (2000). One Europe, Many Nations: A Historical Dictionary of European National Groups. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-30984-7. Retrieved 2011-11-13.
6. "Cultural Proximity of the Slavic Nations". Archived from the original on 2019-12-08. Retrieved 2018-08-26.
7. Danver, Steven L. (2015). Native Peoples of the World: An Encylopedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues: An Encylopedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues. Routledge. p. 271. ISBN 978-1-317-46400-6.
8. "Bulgarian language". The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Columbia University Press.
9. Rehm, Georg; Uszkoreit, Hans (2012). "The Bulgarian Language in the European Information Society". The Bulgarian Language in the Digital Age. White Paper Series. Vol. 4. Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 50–57. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-30168-1_8. ISBN 978-3-642-30167-4.
10. Daniels, Peter T. (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press on Demand. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
11. "Social Construction of Identities: Pomaks in Bulgaria, Ali Eminov, JEMIE 6 (2007) 2 © 2007 by European Centre for Minority Issues" (PDF). Retrieved 2015-02-11.