Bulgarian

Bulgarian is an eastern South Slavic language, spoken by 8 million people predominantly in Bulgaria. It is one of the core members of the Balkan sprachbund, and along with its extremely close relative Macedonian, differs from other Slavic languages in the following ways:

• it has lost grammatical cases
• it has developed definite articles, which are placed at the end of a noun
• it has lost verb infinitives
• it has developed the need to mark verbs for evidentiality, with a “renarrative” mood used when you are passing on something that you have heard has happened, but can’t personally vouch for.

Bulgarian is descended directly from Old Church Slavonic, which was the first Slavic literary language, and is the oldest attested Slavic language. OCS was originally written in an alphabet called Glagolitic, but by the end of the ninth century this was replaced with the Cyrillic alphabet, which Bulgarian is still written in to this day.