This article discusses the phonological system of the Bulgarian language.
The phonemic inventory of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (CSB) has been a contested and controversial matter for decades, with two major currents, or schools of thought, forming at national and international level:
One school of thought assumes palatalization as a phonemic distinction in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian and consequently states that it has 17 palatalized phonemes, rounding its phonemic inventory to 45 phonemes. This view, originally suggested in a sketch made by Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy in his 1939 book Principles of Phonology, was subsequently elaborated by Bulgarian linguists Stoyko Stoykov and Lyubomir Andreychin. It is the traditional and prevalent view in Bulgaria and is endorsed by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; some international linguists also favour it.
The other view considers that there are only 28 phonemes in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel and 6 vowels and that only one of them, the semivowel , is palatal. This view is held by a minority of Bulgarian linguists and a substantial number of international ones.
Vowels
+ Stressed vowels in Bulgarian Front Central Back Closeи у Mid е ъ о Open а
According to their place of articulation, Bulgarian vowels can be grouped in three pairs—front vowels: ⟨е⟩ () and ⟨и⟩ (); central vowels: ⟨а⟩ () and ⟨ъ⟩ (); and back vowels: ⟨о⟩ () and ⟨у⟩ ().
Here , and are "low", and , and are "high".
The dominant theory of Bulgarian vowel reduction posits that Bulgarian vowels have a phonemic value only in stressed position, while when unstressed, they neutralize in an intermediate centralized position, where lower vowels are raised and higher vowels are lowered. This concerns only the central vowels and , which neutralize into , and the back vowels and , which neutralize into .
The merger of and in a similar manner (roughly approaching the lines of ) is not allowed in formal speech and is regarded as a provincial (East Bulgarian) dialectal feature; instead, unstressed is both raised and centralized, approaching the schwa ().
The theory further posits that such neutralization may nevertheless not always happen: vowels may be distinguished in emphatic or deliberately distinct pronunciation, while reduction is strongest in colloquial speech.
Nevertheless, the hypothesis that high and low vowels neutralize into common vowels of intermediate height has never been properly studied or proven in a practical setting. Several recent studies by both Bulgarian and foreign researchers, involving volunteers speaking Contemporary Standard Bulgarian, have established—on the contrary—that while unstressed low vowels , and are indeed raised as expected, unstressed high and are also raised somewhat, rather than lowered, while remains in the same position.
All three studies indicate that a clear distinction is kept between unstressed and both stressed and unstressed . The situation with unstressed and is more complex, but all studies indicate that they both approach unstressed and very closely and overlap with them to a great extent, but their average realisations remain slightly more open. One of the studies finds unstressed to be practically undistinguishable from stressed , while another finds a lack of statistically significant difference between and , and a third one finds coalescence only in formants for one of the pairs and only in tongue position for the other.
While the difference between all stressed vowels and between unstressed and can be heard in almost all cases, the unstressed central and back vowels are perceptually neutralised in minimal pairs, with only 62% identifying unstressed , 59% unstressed and and a mere 57% unstressed .
Semivowels The Bulgarian language officially has only one semivowel: . It is traditionally regarded as a semivowel, but in recent years, it has largely been treated as a "glide" or approximant, thus making it part of the consonant system. Orthographically, it is represented by the Cyrillic letter ( with a breve) as in (prefix 'most') and ( ('trolleybus'), except when it precedes or (and their reduced counterparts and ), in which case both phonemes are represented by a single letter, or , respectively: e.g., ('flat iron'), but ('Jordan').
As a result of lenition of velarized (), ongoing since the 1970s, appears to be an emerging allophone of velarized among younger speakers, especially in preconsonantal position: ('wolf') instead of . While certain Western Bulgarian dialects (in particular, those around Pernik), have had a long-standing tradition of pronouncing as , the use of the glide in the literary language was first noted by a radio operator in 1974. A Ukrainian researcher found in 2012 that Bulgarians split into three age-specific groups in terms of pronunciation: 1) people in their 40s or older who have standard pronunciation; 2) people in their 30s, who can articulate but unconsciously say ; and 3) younger people who are unable to differentiate between the two sounds and generally say .
A study of 30 graduate students was therefore conducted in 2014 to quantify the trend. The study testified to an extremely wide proliferation of the phenomenon, with 9 out of 30 participants unable to produce in any given word, and only 2 participants able to produce correctly, but in no more than half the words in the study. Remarkably, not a single participant was able to enunciate between a bilabial consonant and a rounded vowel, e.g., in ('applauded'), or between a rounded vowel and a velar consonant, e.g. in ('so'). Another discovery of the study was that in particular positions, certain participants enunciated neither nor , but the high back unrounded vowel (or its corresponding glide ).
The glide can also be found in English loan words such as ('whiskey') or ('Wikipedia'). The semivowel forms a number of diphthongs, which are summarized below:
+Falling diphthongs Word initially 'buttermilk' - - - - 'indulge', 'be suitable for' Word medially 'minced meat' - 'twig' 'of a party' 'war' 'uncle' Word finally 'case' 'thus, so' 'nail' 'potassium' 'road bend' 'this' +Rising diphthongs Word initially 'I eat' - 'hierarchy' - 'iodine' 'south' Word medially 'friend' - 'fireworks' - 'area' 'union' Word finally 'statue' 'I drink' - - 'You, Maria!' (vocative case) -
Consonants According to current scholarly consensus, Bulgarian has a total of 35 consonant phonemes (see table below). Three additional phonemes can also be found (, , and ), but only in foreign proper names such as ('Houston'), ('Dzerzhinsky'), and , ('Jadzia'). They are, however, normally not considered part of the phonetic inventory of the Bulgarian language. The Bulgarian obstruent consonants are divided into 12 pairs of voiced and voiceless consonants. The only obstruent without a counterpart is the voiceless velar fricative . The voicing contrast is neutralized in word-final position, where all obstruents are voiceless, at least with regard to the official orthoepy of the contemporary Bulgarian spoken language (word-final devoicing is a common feature in Slavic languages); this neutralization is, however, not reflected in spelling.
Labial Dental/Alveolar Postalveolar Palatal Velar hard soft hard soft hard soft soft hard soft Nasal Stop Affricate () () Fricative () Trill Approximant () Lateral ()
An alternative analysis, however, treats palatal consonants merely as palatalized allophones of their respective "hard" counterparts, which are realised as sequences of consonant + (for example, is analysed as ). This effectively reduces the consonant inventory to 22 phonemes. No ambiguity arises from such a reanalysis since palatalized consonants only occur before vowels and never before other consonants or in the syllable coda as they do in some other languages with palatal consonants (for example, in fellow Slavic language Russian).
This was the prevailing opinion among Bulgarian linguists prior to 1945, shared, among other things, by Stefan Mladenov, Lyubomir Andreychin, Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan, etc. According to French linguist Léon Beaulieux, Bulgarian is characterised by the tendency to eliminate all palatal consonants. Czech linguist Horalek claimed as early as 1950 that palatalisation in standard Bulgarian has practically disappeared through the decomposition and development of a specific glide and that words such as (white) and (grandfather) are not pronounced as and , but rather as and .
Among modern Bulgarian phoneticians, this view is held by Blagoy Shklifov and by Dimitrina Tsoneva, who argues that palatal consonants, though present in a number of dialects and in earlier stages of the development of the Bulgarian language, have been eliminated from the modern literary language.
A phonological table based on this reanalysis is shown below:International Phonetic Association (1999), Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, pp. 55–56.
Labial Dental/Alveolar Postalveolar Dorsal Nasal Stop Affricate () Fricative Approximant () Trill Lateral ()
According to , are dental. He also analyzes as palatalized dental nasal, and provides no information about the place of articulation of .
is voiced with "slight friction" at word boundaries before voiced obstruents. Example: ('I saw him').
Not a native phoneme, but appears in borrowings from English, where it is often vocalised as or pronounced as a fricative in older borrowings which have come through German or Russian. It is always written as the Cyrillic letter ⟨⟩ in Bulgarian orthography. Allophone of among some younger speakers, possible ongoing sound change (see section below).
as a phoneme in Bulgarian has three allophones in complementary distribution; "clear" , occurring before front vowels, "dark" or velarized occurring before central and back vowels, in between vowels and before consonants, and palatalized , occurring before and a central or back vowel.
Hard and palatalized consonants Some linguists believe that, similar to a number of Eastern Slavic languages, most consonant phonemes come in "hard" and "soft" pairs. The latter tend to feature palatalization, or the raising of the tongue toward the hard palate. Thus, for example, contrasts with by the latter being palatalized. The consonants , , , and are considered hard and do not have palatalized variants, though they may have palatalization in some speakers' pronunciation.
The distinction between hard and soft consonants is clear in Bulgarian orthography, where hard consonants are considered normal and precede either , , , , or . Soft consonants appear before , , or . In certain contexts, the contrast hard/soft contrast is neutralized. For example, in Eastern dialects, only soft consonants appear before and . varies: one of its allophones, involving a raising of the back of the tongue and a lowering of its middle part (thus similar or, according to some scholars, identical to a velarized lateral), occurs in all positions, except before the vowels and , where a more "clear" version with a slight raising of the middle part of the tongue occurs. The latter pre-front realization is traditionally called "soft l" (though it is not phonetically palatalized). In some Western Bulgarian dialects, this allophonic variation does not exist.
Furthermore, in the speech of many young people the more common and arguably velarized allophone of is often realized as a labiovelar approximant . This phenomenon, sometimes colloquially referred to as ('lazy l') in Bulgaria, was first registered in the 1970s and is not connected to original dialects. Similar developments, termed L-vocalization, have occurred in many languages, including Polish, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, and English.
Palatalization