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“Language and dialect are quite relative terms. This uncertainty comes from the fact that the answer to the question of whether a language is literary or dialect depends on history and politics,” said linguist Ilya Zlatanov in an interview with Alexander. Andreev from Deutsche Welle.
Before the introduction of modern languages, dialectal and double variants of words are in strong competition. The standardization of a language is a process in which it is encoded, dictionaries are compiled, a unified spelling is introduced, the grammar and, in most cases, it is “People are supposed to agree to build a standard language that everyone strives to learn, although at the time of its creation this standard was not born for anyone,” he explains.
“The Bulgarian literary language is relatively young. During the years of Ottoman rule, the name ‘Bulgarian’ was rarely heard and Bulgarians often identified themselves simply as Christian. That is why Ivan Bogorov, who published the first Bulgarian newspaper” Bulgarian Eagle “In Leipzig, he called:” Before making Bulgaria, we must make Bulgarians. “
Our literary language was built only at the end of the 19th century on the basis of the dialects of the economically developed settlements around Stara Planina: Vasil Aprilov is from Gabrovo, Petar Beron – from Kotel, Ivan Bogorov – from Karlovo, Petko Slaveykov – from Tarnovo and Vazov – from Sopot. And especially among the emigrants in Wallachia, where there is a free press. In Braila Dobri Voynikov founded the first theater company. In the absence of an established standard, the speech of the actors is of great importance in the development of norms for the correction of the language ”, says the linguist.
“Literary Bulgarian continues to be used by those Bulgarians who after the Liberation remained within the multinational Ottoman Empire. After the Inter-Allied War, when the majority of Bulgarians became part of the national states dominated by the language of the titular nation , the influence In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the influence of the Serbian language grew and there was now a lot of Serbianism in the literary norm of Skopje. In Greece, the ideology was that the “Slavophones” were in fact ancient Greeks who had changed their language due to Bulgarian oppression. According to this ideology, the only language worth learning is Greek, so they are using Greek words for modern terms, “Zlatanov continued.
He explains that the differences between literary Bulgarian and extraterritorial Bulgarian speech are deepening due to the increasing Russification of our language. “After Liberation, a temporary Russian government was introduced in Bulgaria. The working language in the ministries is Russian. A powerful influx of Russianism invades the army, the courts and other areas. As Ivan Bogorov points out,” The worst is that these (Russians) if so that they do not attack us so much, we ourselves, without realizing it, serve their pan-Russian thought, and we rush to make our Russian-Bulgarian written language, so that we become blind without meaning to.
“Many Russian words are so deeply ingrained in our language that we no longer even suspect that they are Russian. Even such everyday words as kitchen and stove. In our first cookbooks, the kitchen is called a kitchen and the stove is called a cooking machine. Russian influence on Bulgarian continued until recently, after Bulgarian and Russian became closer together in the 1944 spelling. In the so-called Homeland Front spelling, the last specific Bulgarian letters ѣ, ѫ and ѭ were removed. ” because “it smells a lot of Bulgarian.” These facts illustrate the influence of politics on the language, “said the linguist.
When asked where Bulgarian is spoken outside of Bulgaria, he replied: “Linguists speak multicentric languages, those that have more than one variant of the literary language. From this point of view, Bulgarian could also be defined as multicenter, with its different norms in Bulgaria, Banat and Macedonia, but this does not change the attitude of native speakers, and if the Banat Bulgarians consider their language to be Bulgarian, despite the fact that their language was codified in the middle of the 19th century and uses Latin , Macedonians treat their speech as a separate language. “And this problem, obviously, is not solved with linguistics, but with self-awareness. That is why there is no independent Banat Wikipedia, but there is a Macedonian one. “
Ilya Zlatanov graduated in Russian philology at the University of Saint Petersburg. He publishes in specialized linguistic magazines and collections.
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