A report on Bulgarians, Bulgarian language, Old Church Slavonic and Bulgaria

Bulgarians (българи, ) are a nation and South Slavic ethnic group native to Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe.

Bulgarian (, ; български, ) is a South Slavic language spoken in Southeastern Europe, primarily in Bulgaria.

It is the language of the Bulgarians.

The term Old Bulgarian (старобългарски, Altbulgarisch) is the only designation used by Bulgarian-language writers.

Old Bulgarian (9th to 11th centuries, also referred to as "Old Church Slavonic") – a literary norm of the early southern dialect of the Proto-Slavic language from which Bulgarian evolved. Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples used this norm when translating the Bible and other liturgical literature from Greek into Slavic.

Exiled students of the two apostles, mainly Bulgarians (including Clement of Ohrid and Saint Naum), then brought the Glagolitic alphabet to the First Bulgarian Empire.

The Thracians, one of the three primary ancestral groups of modern Bulgarians, appeared on the Balkan Peninsula some time before the 12th century BC. The Thracians excelled in metallurgy and gave the Greeks the Orphean and Dionysian cults, but remained tribal and stateless.

The establishment of a new state molded the various Slav, Bulgar and earlier or later populations into the "Bulgarian people" of the First Bulgarian Empire speaking a South Slavic language.

The development of Old Church Slavonic literacy in the country had the effect of preventing the assimilation of the South Slavs into neighbouring cultures and it also stimulated the development of a distinct ethnic identity.

Later use of the language in a number of medieval Slavic polities resulted in the adjustment of Old Church Slavonic to the local vernacular, though a number of South Slavic, Moravian or Bulgarian features also survived.

Bulgarian is the only language with official status and native for % of the population.

The schools' emphasis on Christian scriptures made the Bulgarian Empire a centre of Slavic culture, bringing Slavs under the influence of Christianity and providing them with a written language.