A report on Bulgarian language, Old Church Slavonic, Russian language and Slavic languages

Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic was the first Slavic literary language.

The two languages have several characteristics that set them apart from all other Slavic languages; changes include the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite article and the lack of a verb infinitive.

Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group) and Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern dialects of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western dialects of the South group).

It is the most spoken Slavic language, and the most spoken native language in Europe, as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia.

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.

Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian.

The vocabulary (mainly abstract and literary words), principles of word formations, and, to some extent, inflections and literary style of Russian have been also influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly Russified form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Old Church Slavonic

Russian 10%,

Significant later recensions of Old Church Slavonic (referred to as Church Slavonic) in the present time include: Slovene, Croatian, Serbian and Russian.