Bulgarian alphabet

The Bulgarian alphabet is used to write the Bulgarian language.

History

In AD 886, the Bulgarian Empire introduced the Glagolitic alphabet, devised by Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 850s. The Glagolitic alphabet was gradually superseded in later centuries by the Cyrillic script, developed around the Preslav Literary School, Bulgaria at the beginning of the 10th century.

Several Cyrillic alphabets with 28 to 44 letters were used in the early and middle 19th century during the efforts on the codification of Modern Bulgarian until an alphabet with 32 letters, proposed by Marin Drinov, gained prominence in the 1870s: it was used until the orthographic reform of 1945, when the letters Ѣ, ѣ (called ят "yat" or двойно е/е-двойно "double e") and Ѫ, ѫ (called Голям юс "big yus", голяма носовка "big nasal sign", ъ кръстато "crossed ъ" or широко ъ "wide ъ"), were removed from the alphabet, reducing the number of letters to 30.

With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, the Cyrillic script became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts.