a Slavic language spoken in Bulgaria a native or inhabitant of Bulgaria of or relating to or characteristic of Bulgaria or its people; "the Bulgarian capital is Sofia
Atrocities committed by the Ottoman empire in subduing the Bulgarian rebellion of 1876. The name was used by William E. Gladstone in his pamphlet publicizing the incident. About 15,000 persons were reportedly massacred at Philippopolis (now Plovdiv), and villages and monasteries were destroyed. Despite widespread public indignation, the European powers did little in response. The crisis ended with the Congress of Berlin, which created a small, autonomous principality of Bulgaria
South Slavic language spoken by about nine million people in Bulgaria and enclaves in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, and Turkey. Closely related is Macedonian, spoken by two to three million people in Macedonia, adjacent parts of Albania and Greece, and enclaves elsewhere. Both languages differ from other major Slavic languages in several features. Both are direct descendants of Old Church Slavonic. Under Ottoman rule, literary production was solely in Church Slavonic. The Bulgarian vernacular became a literary language only in the mid-19th century; it was codified on the basis of northeastern Bulgarian dialects in 1899. Though efforts to create a literary Macedonian were underway before the Balkan Wars (1912-13), it was not formally recognized as a distinct language until the declaration of a Macedonian Republic within nascent communist Yugoslavia (1944)