Bulgarian phonology

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This article discusses the phonological system of the Bulgarian language.

The phonemic inventory of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (CSB) has been a contested and controversial matter for decades, with two major currents, or schools of thought, forming at national and international level:^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

The first one considers that there are only 28 phonemes in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel and 6 vowels and that only one of them, the semivowel j, is palatal.^[6][7] This was the general consensus reached by all major Bulgarian linguists prior to the Soviet occupation of Bulgaria in 1944, and still continues to be the view held by multiple modern Bulgarian and probably a majority of Western phonologists.^{[8][9][3][10]}

The second school of thought is based on a sketch of Eastern Bulgarian consonantism made by Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy in his 1939 book Principles of Phonology, where he introduced palatalization as additional phonemic distinction in Bulgarian, much like in his native language, Russian.^[11] In Bulgaria, the concept was launched in the late 1940s by two younger linguists, Stoyko Stoykov and Lyubomir Andreychin, who proclaimed the existence of 17 new palatalized phonemes, rounding Standard Bulgarian's phonemic inventory to 45 phonemes, 18 of which are palatal.^[12][13]

Both Stoykov and Andreychin had rejected Trubetzkoy's ideas in the early 1940s, before Bulgaria's occupation by the Red Army.^[14][15] The concept got quick approval from the Bulgarian Communist Party and Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The 17 palatals became a staple of all published standard Bulgarian grammars and phonologies during the totalitarian era.^[16] The consonant model has not fared well abroad, routinely being called into question or outright rejected, including in the 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, which sided with the traditional interpretation.^[17][18]