Bulgarian language policy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe paper presents some general facts about Bulgarian, which is spoken by over 8 million people all over the world and is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria. It is shown that language diversity within the country has been relatively constant and modest over the last 90 years (with a clear dominance of Bulgarian). The focus of the paper is the presentation of the legislation in Bulgaria that regulates language teaching and use in different spheres of life, the main activities of the national institute of language, and the role of language education. The main findings are as follows: There is no dedicated Bulgarian Language Act. Instead, over 100 legislative acts govern issues concerning the usage and study of the Bulgarian language. The Institute for Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences supports the Bulgarian state’s language policy through: researching the present state, history, and dialect variety of the Bulgarian language; monitoring changes in written and spoken language; publishing grammars and dictionaries; and developing language resources and technologies. The key factors that influence language education in Bulgaria include early childhood education and care, equity in education and educational outcomes, and the rise of new learning styles.KEYWORDS: Bulgarian languagelanguage policyofficial language protectionnational institute of languagereading literacy Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 https://www.nsi.bg/en/content/19806/прессъобщение/population-september-7-20212 https://population.un.org/unmigration/index_sql.aspx3 The information is from: https://www.ethnologue.com/language/bul/ (16 countries with less than 20,000 Bulgarians are not presented). The information for North Macedonia is taken from the annual reports of Bulgarian citizenship and the Bulgarians abroad committee, which are affiliated with the Bulgarian Presidency: https://m.president.bg/en/cat107/Godishni-dokladi-grajdanstvo.4 In detail in English, the features of the morphological structure of the Bulgarian language are presented by R. Nicolova (Nicolova, Citation2017).5 https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_19850602_slavorum-apostoli.html6 https://censusresults.nsi.bg/Census/Reports/2/2/R9.aspx7 https://www.nsi.bg/sites/default/files/files/pressreleases/Census2021-ethnos_en.pdf8 The number of dialects depends on the accepted classification.9 https://www.parliament.bg/en/const10 https://www.cem.bg/files/1651646128_zrt_eng.pdf11 https://ibl.bas.bg12 https://ibl.bas.bg/rbe/13 https://ibl.bas.bg/en/informatsiya/uslugi/elektronna-biblioteka/14 https://dcl.bas.bg/bulnet/15 https://ibl.bas.bg/dictionary_portal/lang/en/16 https://ibl.bas.bg/ezikovispravki/17 https://www.facebook.com/ezikovi.spravki/18 https://ibl.bas.bg/en/resursi/19 https://ibl.bas.bg/ezikovi_spravki/20 http://lll.mon.bg/uploaded_files/ZAKON_za_preducilisnoto_i_ucilisnoto_obrazovanie_EN.pdf21 https://www.oecd.org/pisa/22 https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5c07e4f1-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/5c07e4f1-en23 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/66da1bc8-458c-5f73-858c-ea9e2a366872/content24 https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eac/education-and-training-monitor-2021/en/bulgaria.html25 https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eac/education-and-training-monitor-2022/en/country-reports/bulgaria.html26 https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eac/education-and-training-monitor-2021/en/bulgaria.htmlAdditional informationNotes on contributorsSvetla KoevaDr. Svetla Koeva is a professor of computational linguistics and the head of the Department of Computational Linguisticsat the Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests lie in the fields of computational linguistics, formal description of language (morphology and syntax), lexical-semantic networks, and ontologies. She is the principal investigator in the development of various language resources for Bulgarian, such as Bulgarian WordNet, Bulgarian National Corpus, language processing chain, etc. She served as the director of the Institute for Bulgarian Language from 2012 until 2021. Currently, she has been chair of the Research Council of the Institute for Bulgarian Language since 2021. Svetla Koeva is also the editor in chief of the Annual Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language and the weekly edition of The Written Word Remains. Write Correctly! Svetla Koeva has been awarded four prizes by the National Science Fund at the Ministry of Education and Science in Bulgaria and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.