Talk:Seven Slavic tribes

old bulgarian

how come bulgarian language got extinct, and they adopted the old bulgarian language? which it is now? the newer or the older? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Edi1kanobi (talk • contribs) 13:23, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

This is a common misunderstanding, so I'd like to address it even though the question was asked some time ago. There is a crucial difference between the Bulgars and the Bulgarians. The Bulgars were people related to the Huns, the Avars, and the Khazars. Some branch of the Bulgars left Old Great Bulgaria to settle on the Danubian plain. There, they created a common state with some Slavic and local people (most likely of Thracian origin). The subjects of this state mixed, and gradually became one people, known as the Bulgarians. A crucial step in this was the adoption of a common faith (Orthodox Christianity) and a common language (Old Bulgarian) by one of the state's rulers — Kanasubigi Boris. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the common language chosen by Boris was not his mother tongue, Bulgar, but the language of the Slavic-speaking population of the state. Initially, this language was simply referred to as Slavic, but because the state itself was officially the Bulgarian Empire, the designation of the language changed to Bulgarian. Of course, this was long time ago, and as centuries passed, the language evolved into Modern Bulgarian (and also Modern Macedonian).

One would ask, why did the Bulgars adopted another tongue instead of their own? Part of the reason was that the Slavs in the Bulgarian Empire were more than the Bulgars (which were kind-of the military elite). Another was that there were many more Slavic tribes outside the empire, and they were potential new subjects. But I think that the main reason is that codifying a spoken language into a written one is not a simple task, and the work for Slavic was actually already done before its adoption from Boris. Two Byzantine missionaries St. Cyril and St. Methodius codified the Slavic tongues spoken in the area as a part of Byzantine's Empire plan to spread its influence on the Slavs by converting them to Orthodox Christianity. The first "clients", the Moravians, were actually not in the region, but their language was very similar. However, the Moravians decided to go with the Catholic Chrurch, and Pope Stephen V drove the Byzantine missionaries out of Moravia. Kanasubigi Boris used this opportunity and welcomed the banished missionaries in the two literary schools of Preslav (in modern day Bulgaria) and Ohrid (in modern day Macedonia). This helped not only the Bulgarian Empire, but was the starting point for the later literary tradition among the Serbs and the East Slavs as well. Somewhat ironically, the name "Boris" is one of the few words of the Bulgar language that remain in modern day Bulgarian.