Culture

Bulgarians speak a South Slavic language which is mutually intelligible with Macedonian & to a lesser measure with Serbo-Croatian, particularly the eastern dialects. The lexical similarities between Bulgarian and Macedonian are 86%, between Bulgarian and other Slavic languages between 71% and 80%, but with the Baltic languages they are 40–46%, while with English are about 20%. Less than a dozen Bulgarian words are derived from Turkic Bulgar.

Bulgarian demonstrates some linguistic developments that species it except other Slavic languages shared with Romanian, Albanian and Greek see Balkan language area. Bulgarian was influenced lexically by medieval and innovative Greek, and Turkish. Medieval Bulgarian influenced the other South Slavic languages and Romanian. With Bulgarian and Russian there was a mutual influence in both directions. Both languages were official or a lingua franca of regarded and allocated separately. other during the Middle Ages and the Cold War. Recently, Bulgarian has borrowed numerous words from German, French and English.