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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.

Bulgarian's vowels may be grouped in three pairs according to their backness: front, central and back. 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 /a//ɤ/ is regarded as most common, while the status of /ɔ/ vs /u/ is less clear. The coalescence of /ɛ/ and /i/ is not allowed in formal speech and is regarded as a provincial (East Bulgarian) dialectal feature; instead, unstressed /ɛ/ is both raised and centralized, approaching [ɤ]. The /ɤ/ vowel itself does not exist as a phoneme in other Slavic languages, though a similar reduced vowel transcribed as [ə] does occur.


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