Bulgarian is the official (national) language of the country. The language of the migrant Bulgars of Khan Asparuh and that of the local Slav population served as the basis for forming the spoken Bulgarian language. In the middle of IX century, the sainted brothers Cyril and Methodius created the first Old Bulgarian alphabet – the Glagolitsa, and afterward – the Cyrillic, which became the old-Bulgarian alphabet, used for centuries by Bulgarians, Serbs, Russians, Ukrainians, Biyelo-Russians, for a long time by Rumanians (before they assumed the Latin alphabet) and other peoples.
The Old-Bulgarian literary language is the fourth after the Latin, Greek and Jewish languages, acknowledged by the Church in those times, to be used for holy services. Words, quite diverse by their origin, have retained in the language: initially, and rather great in number, amount of Old-Greek and Latin lexis, equally, a fairly large amount of Turkish words and phrases – during the centuriesslong Ottoman dominance (whose presence in the vocabulary quickly dwindled after 1878), and some Russian borrowings – coming from the time of Renaissance (the National Revival).
In the 20th Century, words of Latin origin were borrowed and remained in the lexical wealth of the language, from French – mainly as terms in the field of art, German – in the scope of science and technology, Italian – dominating within the sphere of music, English quite recently, basically serving the needs of business, politics, etc.
Outstanding Bulgarians of the epoch of Revival, like Ivan Bogorov, Nayden Gherov, etc., linguists like Alexander Theodorov-Balan, Benyo Tsonev, Stefan Mladenov, Ivan Shishmanov and further eminent builders of Bulgarian literature’s fundamentals, worked for keeping the purity of language from unnecessary loan-words, release of orthography of the burdening traditionalism and its bringing closer to the live patterns and forms of literary pronunciation. All key works of the contemporary fiction worldwide have been translated into Bulgarian, as well as vast amounts of scientific, technical and other literature.