БЪЛГАРСКИЯТ ЕЗИК В УКРАЙНА –СОЦИОЛИНГВИСТИЧНИ АСПЕКТИ
THE BULGARIAN LANGUAGE IN UKRAINE – SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS

Summary/Abstract: The Bulgarians are one of the national communities living in Ukraine, mainly in Odesa oblast. The Bessarabian Bulgarians in Ukraine inhabit Bucak, the southern part of the Bessarabia region. According to official statistics from 2001, about 129,000 Bulgarians live in the oblast, which is 21 per cent of the total population. The Tavrian Bulgarians, also known as the Azov Bulgarians, live mainly in Zaporizhzhia oblast. They include the Bulgarians from the Crimean Peninsula, or Crimean Bulgarians. Due to a number of historical, social, and cultural reasons, the Bulgarian national language is the language of communication of a single ethnic group that is divided in terms of territory, society, and culture. For a nation, the loss of its native language means the loss of the right to belong to that nation, so for every educated and conscious representative of their people, the protection of their native language has been and remains one of the most important national duties. The Bulgarian language of Ukraine should be approached from a sociolinguistic perspective as a socio-communicative system, a specific linguistic code that allows us to identify its distinctive features in comparison with the literary language and to point out the factors of its invariance and trends in the development of typological features. Contemporary Bulgarian linguists, based on the material of the studied fragment of the lexical system of the Bulgarian language, present reflexes of the Old Slavonic language, among which there are those that have fallen out of use in the mainland language. Changes in the geographical landscape have contributed to increased contact with other languages in the region, leading to the replenishment and sometimes renewal of the lexical composition with new linguistic units. Historical and etymological analysis is particularly relevant because it helps to establish the chronological framework of some foreign borrowings in the Bulgarian language and the direct sources of borrowing in cases where a particular lexical element is present in all the languages in contact in the region. The lexical system of Bulgarian dialects is unique in typological terms, which can be explained by evolutionary processes and the consequences of interlingual contacts. The latter pose a particular problem when considering complex cases of lexical penetration against the background of a wide area. Eight generations of Bulgarian language speakers have preserved the language, so it is entirely reasonable to consider them a model of communicative system stability.

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