Bulgarian
Bulgarian is a member of the South Slavic group of the Indo-European family of languages. It is the native tongue of some 9 million people, most of whom live in Bulgaria, where it is the official language. Although the Bulgars were originally a Turkic-speaking people from Asia, they merged with the Slavic tribes, whom they conquered in the 7th century A.D, and adopted their Slavic language. Until about the 9th century, Slavic had not yet begun to diverge into separate languages, thus Old Slavonic was the predecessor of not just Bulgarian, but all the modern Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.). The written form of this language is often called Old Church Slavonic because writing was first introduced to the Slavic speaking people in order to translate Christian religious documents. Because the Bulgarians were the first among the Slavs to adopt Christianity, Old Church Slavonic is also know as Old Bulgarian. This language is still used as a liturgical language in Eastern Orthodox Slavic churches. Modern Bulgarian, which dates from the 16th century, has borrowed many words from Greek and Turkish, and more recently from Russian, French, and German. It closely resembles the other Slavic languages, especially with regard to grammar, but a major difference between them is that Bulgarian has almost completely dropped the numerous case forms of the noun. A modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet is used for writing Bulgarian.
Sources:
Information on writing system:
omniglot.com
ancientscripts.com/glagolitic
Independent Study Courses Available at UCSD:
Other Local Resources:
UCSD International Center
Mingei museum of folk art
Yahoo group: Bulgarians
in San Diego