Bulgarian Phonology

This article discusses the phonological system of Standard Bulgarian. Most scholars agree that contemporary Bulgarian has 45 phonemes but different authors place the real number of Bulgarian phonemes between 42 and 47, depending on whether one includes or excludes phonemes which appear primarily only in borrowed foreign words.

Vowels

Bulgarian vowels may be grouped in three pairs according to their backness: the front vowels е (, ) and и (, ), the central vowels а (, ) and ъ (, ) and the back vowels о (, ) and у (, ). In stressed syllables, six vowels are phonemic. Unstressed vowels tend to be shorter and weaker compared to their stressed counterparts, and the corresponding pairs of open and closed vowels approach each other with a tendency to merge, above all as low (open and open-mid) vowels are raised and shift towards the high (close and close-mid) ones. However, the coalescence is not always complete. The vowels are often distinguished in emphatic or deliberately distinct pronunciation, and reduction is strongest in colloquial speech. Besides that, some linguists distinguish two degrees of reduction, as they have found that a clearer distinction tends to be maintained in the syllable immediately preceding the stressed one. The complete merger of the pair – is regarded as most common, while the status of vs is less clear. The coalescence of and is not allowed in formal speech and is regarded as a provincial (East Bulgarian) dialectal feature; instead, unstressed is both raised and centralized, approaching . The vowel itself does not exist as a phoneme in other Slavic languages, though a similar reduced vowel transcribed as does occur.

Semivowels

The Bulgarian language contains only one semivowel: . Orthographically, it is represented by the Cyrillic letter ( with a breve) as in ('most') and ('trolleybus'), except when it precedes or (and their reduced counterparts and ), in which case both phonemes are represented by a single letter, respectively or : e.g. ('flat iron'), but ('Jordan').

However may be an allophone of /ɫ/ among some younger speakers. It may also be found in English loan words.

Consonants

Bulgarian has a total of 35 consonant phonemes (see table below). Three additional phonemes can also be found (, , and ), but only in foreign proper names such as ('Houston'), (' Dzerzhinsky'), and , (' Jadzia'). They are, however, normally not considered part of the phonetic inventory of the Bulgarian language. The Bulgarian obstruent consonants are divided into 12 pairs of voiced and voiceless consonants. The only obstruent without a counterpart is the voiceless velar fricative . The voicing contrast is neutralized in word-final position, where all obstruents are voiceless, at least with regard to the official orthoepy of the contemporary Bulgarian spoken language (word-final devoicing is a common feature in Slavic languages); this neutralization is, however, not reflected in spelling.

An alternative analysis, however, treats the palatalized variants of consonant sounds as sequences of the consonant and (for example, is analyzed as ). This effectively reduces the consonant inventory to merely 22 phonemes. No ambiguity arises from such analysis since the palatalized consonants occur only before vowels, and never before other consonants or in the syllable coda as they do in some other languages with palatalized consonants (for example, in the fellow Slavic language Russian).

A phonological table based on this reanalysis is shown below:

According to , are dental. He also analyzes as palatalized dental nasal, and provides no information about the place of articulation of .

Only as an allophone of and before and . For example, ('inflation').

As an allophone of before , and . Examples: ('thin' neut.), ('tango').

is voiced at word boundaries before voiced obstruents. Example: ('I saw him').

Described as having "only slight friction".

Not a native phoneme, but appears in borrowings from English, where it is often vocalised as or pronounced as a fricative in older borrowings which have come through German or Russian. It is always written as the Cyrillic letter ⟨⟩ in Bulgarian orthography. Allophone of /ɫ/ among some younger speakers, possible ongoing sound change

Hard and palatalized consonants

Like a number of Eastern Slavic languages, most consonant phonemes come in "hard" and "soft" pairs. The latter tend to feature palatalization, or the raising of the tongue toward the hard palate. Thus, for example, contrasts with by the latter being palatalized. The consonants , , , and are considered hard and do not have palatalized variants, though they may have palatalization in some speakers' pronunciation.

The distinction between hard and soft consonants is clear in Bulgarian orthography, where hard consonants are considered normal and precede either , , , , or . Soft consonants appear before , , or . In certain contexts, the contrast hard/soft contrast is neutralized. For example, in Eastern dialects, only soft consonants appear before and . varies: one of its allophones, involving a raising of the back of the tongue and a lowering of its middle part (thus similar or, according to some scholars, identical to a velarized lateral), occurs in all positions, except before the vowels and , where a more "clear" version with a slight raising of the middle part of the tongue occurs. The latter pre-front realization is traditionally called "soft l" (though it is not phonetically palatalized). In some Western Bulgarian dialects, this allophonic variation does not exist.

Furthermore, in the speech of many young people the more common and arguably velarized allophone of is often realized as a labiovelar approximant . This phenomenon, sometimes colloquially referred to as ('lazy l') in Bulgaria, was first registered in the 1970s and isn't connected to original dialects. Similar developments, termed L-vocalization, have occurred in many languages, including Polish, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, and English.

Palatalization

During the palatalization of most hard consonants (the bilabial, labiodental and alveolar ones), the middle part of the tongue is lifted towards the palate, resulting in the formation of a second articulatory centre whereby the specific palatal "clang" of the soft consonants is achieved. The articulation of alveolars , and , however, usually does not follow that rule; the palatal clang is achieved by moving the place of articulation further back towards the palate so that , and are actually alveopalatal (postalveolar) consonants. Soft and ( and , respectively) are articulated not on the velum but on the palate and are considered palatal consonants.

Word stress

Stress is not usually marked in written text. In cases where the stress must be indicated, a grave accent is placed on the vowel of the stressed syllable.For practical purposes, the grave accent can be combined with letters by pasting the symbol "̀" directly after the designated letter. An alternative is to use the keyboard shortcut Alt + 0300 (if working under a Windows operating system), or to add the decimal HTML code "̀" after the targeted stressed vowel if editing HTML source code. Se
"Accute accent" diacritic character in Unicode
an

for the exact Unicode characters that utilize the grave accent. Retrieved 2010-06-21.

Bulgarian word stress is dynamic. Stressed syllables are louder and longer than unstressed ones. As in Russian and other East Slavic languages, Bulgarian stress is also lexical rather than fixed as in French, Latin or the West Slavic languages. It may fall on any syllable of a polysyllabic word, and its position may vary depending on the inflection and derivation, for example:
* nouns – ('man'), ('the man'), ('men'), ('the men')
* verbs – ('I am going'), ('go!')

Bulgarian stress is also distinctive: the following examples are not only differentiated by stress (see the different vowels):
* nouns
** ('wool'), ('wave')
** ('steam'), ('coin')
* verbs
** ('when he comes'), (when he came')
** ('explosive'), ('exploded') Note that the last example is only spelled the same in the masculine. In the feminine, neuter and the plural, it is spelled differently – e.g. ''vzrìvna'' ('explosive' fem.), ''vzrivèna'' ('exploded' fem.), etc.

Stress usually isn't signified in written text, even in the above examples, if the context makes the meaning clear. However, the grave accent may be written if confusion is likely. However, the grave accent is obligatorily used to disambiguate between the two non-stressed words –
* ('and'), ('to her')
Since many computer programs do not allow for accents on Cyrillic letters, "" is sometimes seen instead of "".

The stress is often written in order to signify a dialectal deviation from the standard pronunciation:
* ('he told me'), instead of
* ('he wanted to come'), instead of )Note that in this case the accent would be written in order to differentiate it from the present tense ('he wants to come').

Notes

References

Bibliography

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{{Language phonologies

Phonology
Slavic phonologies