Where Bulgarian is spoken
Bulgarian is spoken in 8 countries: Bulgaria, Turkey, Moldova, Ukraine and 4 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Bulgaria | 100% | 6,782,660 |
| Turkey | 0.4% | 353,302 |
| Moldova | 9.4% | 338,356 |
| Ukraine | 0.5% | 174,743 |
| Greece | 0.3% | 28,245 |
| North Macedonia | Not given | Not given |
| Romania | Not given | Not given |
| Serbia | Not given | Not given |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Bulgarian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Bulgarian.
How many people speak Bulgarian?
Wikidata gives about 9 million speakers (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Bulgarian sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Bulgarian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Balto-Slavic
- Slavic
- South Slavic
- Eastern South Slavic
- Macedo-Bulgarian
- Bulgarian
Related languages
Other languages in the Macedo-Bulgarian group:
- Macedonian (2 million speakers)
More about Bulgarian
- Read about Bulgarian on Wikipedia
- Indo-European languages map
- Languages spoken in Bulgaria
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 bul, Glottolog bulg1262. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Bulgarian
Where is Bulgarian spoken?
Bulgarian is spoken in Bulgaria, Turkey, Moldova, Ukraine and 4 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 100% of the population of Bulgaria, which is about 6,782,660 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Bulgarian?
Wikidata gives about 9 million speakers (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.
Which language family is Bulgarian in?
Glottolog places Bulgarian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, South Slavic, Eastern South Slavic and Macedo-Bulgarian.