Българският езиков ареал – славянска периферия, балкански център
The Bulgarian Language Area – Slavic Periphery and Balkan Centre

Summary/Abstract: The Bulgarian language occupies the easternmost and southernmost borders of the South Slavic territory. M. Bartoli’s spatial norm of the lateral areas (Bartoli 1925) is challenged by the Southeast and East Slavic periphery: these regions are innovative rather than archaic. The closer one moves to the edge of the Southeast and East Slavic periphery, the more pronounced the innovations become: Bulgarian exhibits the most evolved form of a Slavic language. Innovations that distinguish it from the Slavic language type – such as analyticity in the nominal system, the presence of a definite artic-le, object reduplication (clitic doubling), and Balkan-type future and conditional forms, as well as the replacement of the infinitive – coexist with classical Indo-European archaisms, including a rich temporal and modal system marked by the vitality of the simple past tenses (aorist and imperfect), which have disappeared in the central Slavic zones. In Bulgarian, the genetic Slavic area and the typological Balkan area are superimposed. In this way, as a Slavic periphery, Bulgarian has preserved certain archaic features (Bartoli’s spatial norm of the lateral areas), while simultaneously representing the core of the Balkan area from both a geographical and linguistic perspective. Bulgarian can be regarded as a kind of Grundform (E. Seidel 1963: 913) of the Balkan Language Union, where so-called Balkanisms are fully represented.

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