Bulgars - Language

Language

The origin and the language of the Bulgars has been the subject of debate since around the start of the 20th century. The current leading theory is that at least the Bulgar elite spoke a language that, alongside Khazar and Chuvash, was a member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family. This theory is supported, among other things, by the fact that some Bulgar words contained in the few surviving stone inscriptions and in other documents (mainly military and hierarchical terms such as tarkan, bagatur, and probably khan) appear to be of Turkic origin and written in Kuban alphabet of the Old Turkic script. Also, the Bulgar calendar had a twelve-year cycle, similar to the one adopted by Turkic and Mongolian peoples from the Chinese, with names and numbers that are deciphered as Turkic. The Bulgars' supreme god was apparently called Tangra, a deity widely known among the Turkic peoples under names such as Tengri, Tura etc.

Some also point out the presence of Turkic loanwords in the Slavic Old Bulgarian language and Church Slavonic language, and the fact that the Bulgars used an alphabet similar to the Turkic Orkhon script; this alphabet was deciphered and analyzed by S. Baichorov: the Bulgar inscriptions were sometimes written in Greek or Cyrillic characters, most commonly in Greek, thus allowing the scholars to identify some of the Bulgar glosses. Contemporaneous sources like Procopius, Agathias and Menander called the Bulgars "Huns", while others, like the Byzantine Patriarch Michael II of Antioch, called them "Scythians" or "Sarmatians", but this latter identification was probably due to the Byzantine tradition of naming peoples geographically. Due to the lack of definitive evidence, modern scholarship instead uses an ethnogenesis approach in explaining the Bulgars' origin. There are also a number of Iranic words in modern Bulgarian, inherited from the Bulgars.

Further evidence culturally linking the Danubian Bulgar state to Turkic steppe traditions was the layout of the Bulgars' new capital of Pliska, founded just north of the Balkan Mountains shortly after 681. The large area enclosed by ramparts, with the rulers' habitations and assorted utility structures concentrated in the center, resembled more a steppe winter encampment turned into a permanent settlement than it did a typical Roman Balkan city."

In Bulgarian academy, a hypothesis linking the Bulgar language to the Iranian language group has become popular in the 1990s. Most proponents still assume an intermediate stance, proposing certain signs of Iranian influence on a Turkic substrate. while other Bulgarian scholars actively oppose the "Iranian hypothesis".