Talk:Bulgarian language/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Geographic distribution

This article has very little content about the geographic distribution. I've had an initial stab with this, which I'm presenting here for community vetting before adding it to the article:

Bulgarian is the official language of Bulgaria, where it is used in all spheres of public life. As of 2011, it is spoken natively by about 6 million people in the country, or about four out of every five Bulgarians.

There is also a significant Bulgarian diaspora abroad. One of the main historically established communities are the Banat Bulgarians, who migrated in the 17th century to the Banat region now split between Romania, Serbia and Hungary. They speak the Banat Bulgarian dialect, which has had its own written standard and a historically important literary tradition.

Another major community abroad are the Bessarabian Bulgarians, whose settlement in the Bessarabia region of nowadays Moldavia and Ukraine dates mostly to the early 19th century. There were 134,000 Bulgarian speakers in Ukraine at the 2001 census, 41,800 in Moldova as of the 2014 census (of which 15,300 were habitual users of the language), and presumably a significant proportion of the 13,200 ethnic Bulgarians residing in neighbouring Transnistria in 2016.

There are Bulgarian speakers in neighbouring countries as well. The regional dialects of Bulgarian and Macedonian form a dialect continuum, and there is no clear-cut boundary where one language ends and the other begins. Within the limits of the republic of North Macedonia a strong separate Macedonian identity has emerged since the World Wars, even though there still are a small number of citizens who identify their language as Bulgarian. Beyond the borders of North Macedonia, the situation is more fluid, and the pockets of speakers of the related regional dialects in Albania and in Greece variously identify their language as Macedonian or as Bulgarian. There were 13,300 speakers in Serbia in 2011, mainly concentrated in the so-called Western Outlands along the border with Bulgaria., and a large number in Turkey. Bulgarian is also spoken by Pomaks in Turkey.

The language is also represented among the diaspora in Western Europe and North America, which has been steadily growing since the 1990s. Countries with significant numbers of speakers include Germany, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom (38,500 speakers in England and Wales as of 2011), France, the United States, and Canada (19,100 in 2011).

References

A major caveat is that the references above are all only for the specific figures. The rest of the text is practically unsourced. Some of that is common knowledge bordering on WP:BLUESKY, some of it (like the dialect continuum stuff) is sourced elsewhere in the article, and some is simply a brief summary of content that is extensively covered in the linked articles. Could editors have a look and make sure I haven't unwittingly written anything fundamentally wrong. Pinging StoyanStoyanov80, who has recently commented here, and Jingiby, who, of all the regulars, is probably the one least likely to agree with me on many issues. – Uanfala (talk) 23:46, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

What I can add here is the number of the Pomaks in Turkey and Greece, which is ca. 500,000. Most of them have as a home language different Bulgarian dialects. Jingiby (talk) 04:04, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I've amended the text above to mention the Pomaks. But do we have any reliable sources for their numbers in Turkey, specifically for those who still speak Bulgarian? See the thread just above, where it's clear that even Ethnologue's figure of 358,000 speakers in Turkey is likely a gross overestimate. – Uanfala (talk) 14:52, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I would add the Serbian dialects into the sentence about the South Slavic dialectal continuum. The sentence should read like this: "The regional dialects of Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian form a dialect continuum as part of the wider South Slavic dialect continuum." All south Slavic dialects are in one large dialectal continuum. There are no two neighboring south Slavic dialects that are not mutually intelligible. One third of the Serbian dialects are closely related to Macedonian and Bulgarian. GStojanov (talk) 11:25, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

GStojanov, I don't think your suggestion makes sense as that sentence is about how the language now known as Macedonian was called Bulgarian back then as a dialect. Also Macedonian and Bulgarian are the only two languages in the Eastern South Slavic group while Serbian is in the Western South Slavic group. --StoyanStoyanov80 (talk) 11:55, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

StoyanStoyanov80, there is no dialectal border between Serbian and Bulgarian dialects, just as there is not dialectal border between Macedonian and Serbian dialects. From Skopje, to Kumanovo, to Vranje and then Nish dialects gradually change (Skopje and Kumanovo are in Macedonia and Vranje and Nish are in Serbia). All south Slavic dialects exist in one dialectal continuum, since there is no dialectal border to separate them. GStojanov (talk) 12:27, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I mentioned only Macedonian in the passage above because the fact of the dialectal continuity helps clarify the fluid identification of some speakers, and hopefully helps explain why the same communities in Albania and Greece may variously be counted as either Bulgarian or Macedonian. It was my impression that the Bulgarian/Serbian identities are a lot more clear-cut, even if the underlying language differences aren't. Is it necessary to point out the continuity here? Of course, I wouldnd't mind if mention is added. – Uanfala (talk) 14:52, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

The point is that Bulgarian and Macedonian do not form an exclusive dialectal continuum. They are just part of the South Slavic dialectal continuum. There is no dialectal border between Bulgarian and Serbian. Every neighboring dialect is mutually ineligible with the ones that surround it: western Bulgarian dialect is similar to Torlakian, which in turn gradually changes into central and northern Serbian dialects. GStojanov (talk) 20:51, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Serbian and Bulgarian are not that similiar, it is like comparing Spanish and Italian. I think the issue here is to be totally honest (no offence intended) that some nationalist ethnic Macedonians get offended when you point out the fact that the Macedonian language was until recently seen as a dialect of Bulgarian. You could add that Serbian is similar to Bulgarian somewhere in the paragraph, however you could pretty much do this with any other Slavic language such as Russian. Uanfala, I am not sure if you can speak Bulgarian or Macedonian but native speakers of these languages can communicate with little issue with each other. You can see this for example in television interviews where Bulgarian and Macedonian politicians frequently hop on the other country's major television channels and talk with the hosts there without any need for a translator. Although this does not mean that they are identical. --StoyanStoyanov80 (talk) 16:47, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I think it may be more accurate to add that Bulgarian is in a dialect continuum with the other South Slavic languages. --StoyanStoyanov80 (talk) 16:54, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I agree. That can be a separate sentence preceding the one we are discussing. GStojanov (talk) 20:55, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Neither Bulgarian, nor Macedonian have a direct contact with Serbian. Both are bordering with transitional group called Torlakian dialects, that are described till today as Eastern South Slavic and were described as Bulgarian dialects ca. 100 years ago. Jingiby (talk) 19:12, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

And Torlakian dialects are in dialectal continuum with central and northern Serbian dialects. GStojanov (talk) 20:51, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

https://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Dialect_continuum This page may clear up confusion. Even though languages are in a dialect continuum it doesn't mean they are mutually intelligible. I suggest that it could be added in this sentence in the intro "Along with the closely related Macedonian language (collectively forming the East South Slavic languages), it is a member of the Balkan sprachbund." which will turn in "Along with the closely related Macedonian language (collectively forming the East South Slavic languages), it is a member of the Balkan sprachbund and the South Slavic dialect continuum" Let me know what you guys think.--StoyanStoyanov80 (talk) 03:05, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

I support that addition. GStojanov (talk) 15:46, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Few comments:

• "As of 2011, it is spoken natively by about 6 million people in the country, or about four out of every five Bulgarians." - Total citizens: 7364570; citizens specified "Mother tongue": 6642154; Indicated Bulgarian: 5659024; Bulgarians that indicated Bulgarian as mother tongue: 5571049. 98.45% of the Bulgarians have declared Bulgarian as their mother tongue, which is far from 80% as this text describes. In general, we should use "Bulgarians" and "Bulgarian citizens" where these groups are concerned, to avoid confusion. If we will quote the census, we should use "mother tongue", instead of "native language" as this is the term that is used there and this is the question the citizens answered. Turks in Bulgaria have mostly Turkish as mother tongue, but Bulgarian is also native for them.
• "One of the main historically established communities..." are the Bessarabian Bulgarians (270,000+), while the Banat Bulgarians are indicated as 8,000 (15,000 est.). I think we should mention the Bessarabian Bulgarian before the Banat ones as they are more significant in number, although they appeared later in time i.e. quantity vs chronology.
• "The Big Excursion" should be also mentioned, as about 360,000 Bulgarian Turks which speak the Bulgarian language "resettle" in Turkey. They are a significant number, even if we assume that now in Turkey live only about 200,000 of them (30 years have passed) and the newly born in Turkey mostly do not speak Bulgarian, this still should be mentioned as a significant group.

--StanProg (talk) 20:17, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Good points, StanProg! I'll clarify it's Bulgarian citizens (and not ethnic Bulgarians), move mention of Bessarabian Bulgarians to the fore, and clarify about L2 speakers in Turkey. I'm not very keen on a term like "mother tongue" though; I had used native language to mean more or less what it is normally taken to mean, but that could be changed to "first language" to avoid confusion. Maybe something could be said about the almost univeral bilingualism among Bulgarian Turks, but I don't have easily accessible sources at the moment.
As for the other concerns above – now that the History section has been expanded with a mention of the Balkan Sprachbund and the SE Slavic continuum, I will take it that there's no more need for the geography section to be covering that. How about the following tweaked version of the proposed text?

Bulgarian is the official language of Bulgaria, where it is used in all spheres of public life. As of 2011, it is spoken as a first language by about 6 million people in the country, or about four out of every five Bulgarian citizens.

There is also a significant Bulgarian diaspora abroad. One of the main historically established communities are the Bessarabian Bulgarians, whose settlement in the Bessarabia region of nowadays Moldavia and Ukraine dates mostly to the early 19th century. There were 134,000 Bulgarian speakers in Ukraine at the 2001 census, 41,800 in Moldova as of the 2014 census (of which 15,300 were habitual users of the language), and presumably a significant proportion of the 13,200 ethnic Bulgarians residing in neighbouring Transnistria in 2016.

Another community abroad are the Banat Bulgarians, who migrated in the 17th century to the Banat region now split between Romania, Serbia and Hungary. They speak the Banat Bulgarian dialect, which has had its own written standard and a historically important literary tradition.

There are Bulgarian speakers in neighbouring countries as well. The regional dialects of Bulgarian and Macedonian form a dialect continuum, and there is no well-defined boundary where one language ends and the other begins. Within the limits of the republic of North Macedonia a strong separate Macedonian identity has emerged since the World Wars, even though there still are a small number of citizens who identify their language as Bulgarian. Beyond the borders of North Macedonia, the situation is more fluid, and the pockets of speakers of the related regional dialects in Albania and in Greece variously identify their language as Macedonian or as Bulgarian. In Serbia, there were 13,300 speakers as of 2011, mainly concentrated in the so-called Western Outlands along the border with Bulgaria. Bulgarian is also spoken in Turkey: natively by Pomaks, and as a second language by many Bulgarian Turks who emigrated from Bulgaria, mostly during the "Big Excursion" of 1989.

The language is also represented among the diaspora in Western Europe and North America, which has been steadily growing since the 1990s. Countries with significant numbers of speakers include Germany, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom (38,500 speakers in England and Wales as of 2011), France, the United States, and Canada (19,100 in 2011).

References

I'm presenting this for further discussion, and will add it to the article if there are no further objections in the next couple of days. – Uanfala (talk) 21:16, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

"a strong separate Macedonian identity has emerged since the World Wars" should be "a strong separate Macedonian identity has emerged since the Second World War" as the Serbs were trying to Serbianize people there until then. --StoyanStoyanov80 (talk) 22:51, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Sourcing for claims regarding Turkish borrowing

The claim about Turkish reaching 50% of vernacular language before standardization comes from what is agreed to be a non-linguistic source ("State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands"). This source turn bases these claims on "The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development" where no explanation or any source is provided for how this figure was calculated. This claim is very unlikely. The table provided in the section about borrowing shows, Turkish words are 14% of borrowing, which in turn represented 25% of all words, so about 3% of Bulgarian words were of Turkish origin. This would mean that 96% of Turkish words were removed from the vocabulary, certainly a difficult claim to believe. It should be pointed out that, unlike in other Slavic languages, there was never an organized purification of the Bulgarian language, with most newly created words being created and popularized by writers working on their own. Furthermore, these figures are in stark contradiction with the much better source tables on borrowing in Bulgarian language: taking into account the certainly larger current Bulgarian vocabulary, the fact that 50% of Bulgarian words are directly inherited from Proto-Slavic and that there were certainly borrowing from other languages (like Greek) and native formation of words before the standardization of language, the figure of 50% Turkish borrowings is simply not sustainable mathematically. It should be pointed out that texts even from the early 19th century are published in modern Bulgaria without translation, which would be difficult to do if the language used at the time was that different.

To summarize: against all these objections we only have a rather low-quality source that contradicts more recent, better sources. In addition, it contain the very dubious claim that a wholly Turkish book written in Greek would have been more useful than Church Slavonic book written presumably in Cyrillic. This claim is only supported by the book "От Паисия до Раковски", a collection of articles published by Ivan Shishmanov, who died in 1928. This is also a poor indication of the reliability of "The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development" as a source. Taking this all together, to support the extraordinary claim of there being 50% Turkish words in Bulgarian, a much better source that is line with more recent research is necessary. Kostja (talk) 22:31, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The claim in question, which I find baffling that you would see as unusual, is that Turksish loans made up about half of the lexicon of early 19th-century spoken Bulgarian. This is about the spoken language, not the language of literary works of the time (which heavily emulated OCS and hence was probably as incomprehensible to uneducated Bulgarians of the time as it is to modern-day students). I don't think comparisons with modern Bulgarian's lexical composition are helpful: when compared with the spoken language of two centuries ago, modern standard Bulgarian has far fewer Turkish loans, a much larger vocabulary overall (as typical of literary languages), and a great prevalence of post-Ottoman loans from western languages, Russian, or (re-)borrowings from OCS. – Uanfala (talk) 23:09, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The source used is not clear enough about what kind of language they consider vernacular, which is another argument against using it to support the claim about 50% Turkish words. Also, how exactly did the author determine spoken language usage in the early 19th century if the only written works available would differ significantly from the spoken language? There was no way to record spoken language at the time after all. As for the number of words borrowed from Turkish, it has been estimated that the currently used Turkish borrowings are a fifth of those who were used at any time (from "The fate of Turkish borrowings in the Bulgarian language and Bulgarian culture", cited here, page 2). It has been estimated (in 1980, cited here) that there were about 850 Turkish borrowings then in use in Bulgarian (excluding derived words), giving somewhat above 4000 Turkish words to have been ever used in Bulgarian. It's very difficult to believe that even vernacular Bulgarian had so few non-Turkish words as to have these be about 50% of all words used. Especially when it's considered that most Slavic words in Bulgarian were estimated to be derived - not new formations from proto-Slavic, that a large number of Turkish borrowings in Bulgaria have native synonyms and that there were already significant borrowings from other languages at the time (this is explained in "The Slavonic languages", the source used for the number of borrowings in the Bulgarian language", pp.188-190). To summarize, the extraordinary claim about the number of Turkish words in Bulgarian is simply too unclear, too ambiguous and too poorly sourced (based on unsupported, outdated information that contradicts more recent work). Kostja (talk) 00:11, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't have access to The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development. You've seen it and it doesn't provide any context, explanation or source for the statement, is that correct?
Whatever the method, I think it's clear this isn't a rigorous calculation, but more a qualitiative statement about the prevalence of Turkish loandwords at the time. I don't believe it's a meaningful question to ask if this statement pertains to the local speech in Kalofer of the 1820s, or rather to the language as used in Kotel in the 1840s.
The spoken language at the time isn't completely inaccessible to modern inquiry: there are obviously the earliest dictionaries and descriptions, but also: glossaries by travellers or missionaries, non-literary written documents (e.g. traders' inventories, personal notes, graffiti), and representations of the language in the speech of characters in fiction.
Your estimate of 4000 Turkish loans at the time actually lends further credence here. Spoken non-literary languages typically have a lexicon that's about 10,000 words or fewer. Even the most detailed dictionaries of such languages will normally have a few thousand lemmas. – Uanfala (talk) 01:49, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, the article about Bulgarian language in The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development, doesn't have any explanation for how the figure was derived or any source attributed.

Even if there was no problems with the source, the idea that the frequency of words used in spoken language two centuries ago could be estimated to any degree of certainty is dubious at best. Such an estimate would require a far more detailed knowledge of daily language than could be derived by any of the methods listed (and dictionaries would be of little help). This is of course especially true of Bulgarian, where there are very few records of the type you suggested in this period: literacy was very limited and Greek had supplanted to a significant degree Bulgarian even in personal writing. Therefore, attempting to estimate what proportion of spoken speech was of Turkish origin in this period is at best speculation and is not really appropriate for an important article like this one.

The estimate of about 4000 Turkish loans is for all Turkish words known to have been borrowed, not those used frequently in everyday speech, as some words would have inevitably. Kostja (talk) 13:18, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Merger of grammar sections

I propose to merge grammar sections with the already existing articles on different topics on Bulgarian grammar, for example "Verbs" subsection should be merged with existing "Bulgarian verbs" article, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.205.242.119 (talk) 06:18, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Agreeing here. That's a good idea because the grammar section of this article actually contains more information than the "Bulgarian grammar" article itself. Tambovskiy Volk (talk) 23:58, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Oppose for Bulgarian nouns, Bulgarian pronouns and Bulgarian verbs on the grounds that these are in appropriate WP:SUMMARY form. I agree that Bulgarian grammar might benefit from some of the material scattered over the Bulgarian language page, but this is a re-organization rather than a merge, so I don't think that the merge is appropriate; some parts could perhaps be copied. Klbrain (talk) 12:27, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. Anthony Emmanuel N. Mapoy (talk) 07:24, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

Formatting

Please understand the formatting looks better that way and it’s certainly not vandalism. Ill provide the following reasons:

1. The formatting is better as capitalised (as used in titles, subtitles etc) opposed to lowercase. The text above is bold and as such does not require to be capitalised.

2. Your edit is inconsistent either way, as the top text: the first letter “B” is capitalised for “Bulgarian” however the native name is fully lowercase.

3. The edit with it fully capitalised was in place for a pretty significantly long time without any issues at all.

I should also mention, my previous edits in different articles and different format types, I can see how they specifically don’t look better in those specific circumstances and I apologise for the edits. However, I only persisted because I thought edits to correct it were vandalism itself. I was not aware of this discussion feature to resolve disputes.

Hopefully we can come to an understanding, I don’t plan to spam edit. Thanks. 81.148.230.120 (talk) 16:58, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi, you need gain a consensus here, or at least a wide support to introduce your ideas. For know, you failed everywhere. Jingiby (talk) 17:01, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

"the native name is fully lowercase" - that is correct, and it should be that way - in Bulgarian, language names are always written in lowercase (unless in the beginning of a sentence of course). You should also look at other articles about languages and notice that there the native language names are not all caps either, so we couldn't have it be in all caps here either. --V111P (talk) 14:08, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

All caps aren't normally used in such circumstances (see MOS:ALLCAPS). Compare also other articles: French language, Italian language, Russian language, etc. The original addition of all caps remained for just over a week (likely because people didn't notice that change among all the intervening edits), and that's too short a period for an implicit consensus to be conceivable. – Uanfala (talk) 19:12, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Reply

Hi. Can you please address/refute the reasons I provided, as I would prefer to be corrected.

Also, this specific edit had a lot of support evidenced by how long it was reinstated for. Only just now did a different anonymous IP edit it incorrectly to something different than your edit, which I corrected back to mine and you decided to remove my correction, to an edit which differed from the initial spark of interest anyways.

From the objective facts I provided I’m not seeing myself fail.

Thanks. 81.148.230.120 (talk) 17:07, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Check the orthographic rules on All caps article and provide any proofs from there. Your personal opinion is not based on them. Thanks. Jingiby (talk) 17:28, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

The article you specified states; proper names can be capitalised, and exceptional circumstances are permitted if they are valid. From the many reasons and proofs I provided previously that demonstrate the benefits of this specific formatting, under the article would be permitted. 2A00:23C7:F501:6101:8487:8807:DDB1:D31F (talk) 08:58, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Just to mention, unfortunately I cannot find where to reply directly and not create a new section so my apologies.

How other articles use formatting i don’t find massively relevant (as this article has exceptional circumstances) or particularly a strong argument. The formatting you wish to change it to is for one inconsistent, as “Bulgarian” has a capitalised “B” however “български” is fully lowercase.

“Bulgarian” is bold so it doesn’t require to be capitalised while български should be for emphasis/proper name reasons. And formatting looks better.

This article incorrectly uses a cursive font for printed Bulgarian in some devices when this font is not official, universal or frequently used especially in this circumstances of print. This can cause confusion, and capitalised form looks like how printed Bulgarian by standard is, minimising confusion as a reader can see both lowercase (showcasing cursive font) and uppercase (which represents cursive still, however looks identical to standard print). An alternative would be to have the font there not be the cursive type.

Other articles which do not do this are not necessarily correct, and there are additional factors in consideration for this article.

All of the above is supported by the rules article the other person mentioned, including exceptional circumstances and proper names. 2A00:23C7:F501:6101:8487:8807:DDB1:D31F (talk) 09:55, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

From the mobile web interface, you can only edit the entire talk page (there should be a pencil icon at the top right, after you tap it, you'd need to scroll down to the end of the text field to reach this section). Editing individual sections is a lot easier from the desktop view (you can access that on mobile as well: there's a link at the very bottom of the page).

Back to the main question. As pointed out above, the guidelines for use of all caps are at MOS:ALLCAPS: in short, this formatting is not used except in a very narrow set of circumstances (and these aren't found here). In principle, it's possible to have an exception to these rules, but there has to be a specific reason for it. I don't see any reason to treat Bulgarian differently from all the other languages (including Cyrillic-using ones). If this article uses all caps for the native name and all others don't, then this may mislead readers into thinking that capital letters are used more liberally for Bulgarian (which they aren't). – Uanfala (talk) 11:22, 16 October 2022 (UTC)