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Bulgaria: A New Script for Europe
July 17, 2006
Transitions Online (www.tol.cz), 14 July 2006
by Georgi Iliev
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Europe prepares to add another alphabet in addition to the Latin and Greek.
PLOVDIV, Bulgaria | When Bulgaria becomes the 26th member state of the EU (most likely in January 2007) the union will get not just a new member, but a new alphabet.
Bulgaria will be the second EU country, after Greece, to use a non-Latin alphabet and the first to use Cyrillic, which originated in the medieval Bulgarian Empire.
The EU now has 20 official languages. The forthcoming accession of Bulgaria and Romania and the introduction of Irish as an official language on 1 January 2007 will raise this number to 23, but Bulgaria is the only country not to use the Latin or Greek alphabets.
The Cyrillic alphabet is used in eight Slavic European countries - Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia - either as the only alphabet or in parallel with the Latin alphabet. Some non-Slavic former Soviet republics also use the script to write their vernaculars.
The Cyrillic alphabet emerged from the Glagolitic alphabet, which was invented around the year 855 by two brothers, the Byzantine scholars Saint Cyril (known during his lifetime as Constantine) and Saint Methodius.
It is generally accepted that the Cyrillic alphabet, which is confusingly named after Saint Cyril, was in fact invented by Saint Clement of Ohrid on the basis of the work of his teachers Cyril and Methodius. The new script was not as complex as the Glagolitic alphabet and was close to the Greek alphabet, which was well known throughout the Bulgarian Empire and the rest of Europe. This facilitated the adoption of the new letters in the Slavic world.
Over the centuries, Cyrillic was adapted to the local peculiarities of the various languages, which led to several modern variants. The current Bulgarian version, for example, has been in use since the spelling reform of 1945, when the number of letters was set at 30, the same number used in Serbian. (Russian and Ukrainian use 33 letters and some non-Slavic languages even more.)
A EUROPEAN FUTURE
What does Bulgaria's entry into the EU mean for the alphabet?
There has been talk in Bulgaria about the future of Cyrillic given the processes of globalization and European integration. Some Bulgarians worry the country might have to abandon its heritage to facilitate commerce.
Others reject these worries by pointing to Greek. Greece and Cyprus are the only two countries in the world where Greek is the official language; their combined population of roughly 12 million people is only a fraction of the total population of the EU. Nevertheless, neither Greece nor Cyprus had to compromise their national heritage when they joined the EU. Greek letters are now found on euro coins and official documents from Brussels.
A bigger threat might be the success of the Internet and similar communication technologies. For sheer ease and flexibility, more and more Internet users in Bulgaria prefer to write in Latin letters. The free Latin interpretation of the Bulgarian words leads to many spelling and grammar mistakes, which people unwittingly transfer to their offline writing. But writing Bulgarian with Latin letters would do nothing to make it more easily understandable to anyone who is not acquainted with it already, so ease of communication is perhaps less of an argument in favor of dropping Cyrillic letters than may appear at first glance.
What about the effects on the EU itself?
The principle of "unity in diversity" is a cornerstone of the EU - diversity of languages, cultures, traditions, and, one might add, alphabets. According to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, proposed in 1999, the union shall respect linguistic diversity. One of the most ambitious goals of the union is that as many of its citizens as possible should speak two languages in addition to their mother tongues. (Current statistics suggest about a quarter of EU citizens claim to speak two foreign languages.) The Cyrillic alphabet and the Bulgarian language will add to this cultural diversity that makes the EU unique.
But the EU's policy of multilingualism has its cost. The 20 current official languages produce over 400 possible language combinations for translation or interpretation. Adding Irish, Bulgarian, and Romanian will increase the technical challenges. According to the official figures for 2005, the annual cost of the EU's language services - essentially, fees for translators and interpreters plus technical equipment - is 1.123 billion euros. However, this figure needs to be seen in context: it is just 1 percent of the EU's annual budget and translates into just 2.28 euros per citizen per year. That seems a small price to pay for the right to communicate in your own language.
ARMY OF TRANSLATORS
Once Bulgaria becomes a full member of the EU, all important documents will have to be published in Bulgarian as well. That task will fall to the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), the world's largest translation service with a staff of 1,650 linguists and 550 support staff in its offices in Brussels and Luxembourg as well as an army of freelance translators and interpreters all over the world.
The DGT is ready to face the challenge of dealing with the Bulgarian language and its Cyrillic alphabet. "All our databases for internal document management, the interfaces of our software applications and all hardware equipment, including keyboards, have been built around Unicode, which is a system allowing representation of alphabets of all languages," Tytti Granqvist of the DGT's communication and information unit told TOL. "Therefore, the use of Cyrillic characters, as any other character set recognized by Unicode, is no problem for our IT systems."
Indeed, the DGT specialists do not expect any major technical difficulties. "We use already one non-Latin alphabet, the Greek one, so I think the introduction of Cyrillic will not be a big deal," Jyrki Lappi-Seppala, head of the DGT field office in Tallinn, Estonia, told TOL based on his experience with the introduction of Estonian, which has a number of special characters. "The introduction of Bulgarian as a new official language presents, of course, a huge challenge otherwise, finding enough translators able to translate from and into Bulgarian being the most important one," he said.
The DGT aims to recruit 60 full-time Bulgarian translators.
Bulgaria has embarked on several projects to facilitate its linguistic accession to the EU. The Bulgarian Ministry of State Administration and Administrative Reform has launched a project called "Comprehensible Bulgaria," part of which is the development of a computer system for the transliteration of Bulgarian names into Latin characters.
The software, developed by linguists at the Bulgarian Academy of Science, aims to create a unified transliteration system to end the use of previous systems with their ambiguities. The subtleties involved in creating a unified system that also allows for exceptions based on habit or practicalities is best illustrated by the name of the country. In principle, the country should be spelled "Balgariya," its capital "Sofiya." But it is evident that this would find few followers outside the country, which will therefore continue to be "Bulgaria" in the Latin script, with its capital "Sofia."
Bulgaria is also replacing road signs with new ones featuring both Cyrillic and Latin letters. This is of paramount importance for the further development of Bulgaria's top-priority industry - tourism. The current Cyrillic signs - gobbledygook for most foreign visitors - are seen as a major impediment to luring tourists off the main roads. Replacing them won't come cheap, however: in Sofia alone, about 1.5 million street and building signs will have to be changed, according to municipal officials.
The Bulgarian Culture Ministry has also announced plans to create a new Cyrillic font to be used as a standard in public administration, European institutions, and the country's media once Bulgaria enters the EU, according to reports by Bulgarian National Radio.
As part of the broader Bulgarian agenda to promote Cyrillic ahead of the country's entry into the EU, the national air carrier Bulgaria Air decorated its planes with letters from the Cyrillic alphabet and provided its foreign passengers with an amusing game introducing the letters.
Regardless of any technical difficulties and cultural challenges the Bulgarian language may encounter on its European road, the Cyrillic alphabet does not seem to be under threat. "Throughout the ages, Bulgaria has acted as a carrier for the Cyrillic alphabet and culture in the Slavic world," historian Vidin Sukarev of the Plovdiv Historical Museum told TOL. "Today Bulgaria once more has been given a historic chance, to present Cyrillic to the EU family."
Georgi Iliev is a journalist based in Plovdiv.
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