Bulgarian vocabulary

Loanwords from Greek were the first to enter the lexis of Bulgarian, as early as the time of Old Bulgarian, (for example, икона “icon” or патриарх “patriarch”) as a product of the influence of the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church. During the period of Ottoman rule, Bulgarian adopted from Greek both common lexical material (хиляда “a thousand”) and international vocabulary of Greek origin (граматика “grammar”). Loanwords from Latin were adopted mainly in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries,, and the vast majority of them are international terms in the areas of politics, civil administration, medicine, law, etc. (for example, администрация “administration”). Borrowings from French cover a similar time span and are concentrated in the areas of social and political life, military affairs, cooking, the arts, etc. (бюфет “buffet”).

Loanwords from Turkish (and through Turkish from Arabic and Persian) are a legacy of the period of Ottoman rule (1422–1878) and are divided into two stylistic layers. The first one is neutral and is represented by a corpus of some 800 words, mostly items of clothing, foods and household items (чорап “sock”; чекмедже “drawer”). The remainder consists of colloquial or slightly vulgar terms which occur particularly often in expressive speech and frequently have a humoristic or even pejorative nuance. They generally have neutral native synonyms (cf акъл from Turkish vs ум from common Slavic, both meaning “wits, intelligence”). There is a fluent transition between this group and a large amount of more or less obsolete words that only occur in archaic or dialectal speech.

English is the only language that has significantly influenced Bulgarian since the 1950s. The share of English borrowings at present is much larger than the 2% in the 1960s and most likely lies between 10% and 15% of all borrowings. The impact of English is particularly strong in technology, sports, dress, the arts, music and popular culture: корнер “corner” (football), пънк “punk”.

Some very frequent expressions have been borrowed from other languages. Most of them are somewhat informal.

• Мерси (mersí) – Thank you; from French merci (although this word is probably even more common than native Благодаря, it is inappropriate in very official or solemn contexts)
• Чао (cháo) – Bye; from Italian ciao (the informal counterpart of native Довиждане, this word is more common than the native)
• Супер (súper) – Super; (from Latin, colloquial; note – "super" remains the same regardless of quantity or gender, although an even more colloquial adjective суперски (súperski) does decline as usual)
• Ало (álo) – Hello on the phone; from French allô (unlike the above, this word is stylistically neutral).