Background

Language Family: Indo-European / Slavic / South / Eastern

Phonology

All consonants (except for postalveolars) also have palatalized forms in Bulgarian. The palatalization distinctions are frequently held to be phonemic, but due to their relative scarcity (fairly few words with > 100 instances in Crúbadán) and their limited distribution (the contrast only occurs before non-front vowels, per Scatton (1983), p. 64), such an analysis would be problematic for this project. Instead, I have opted to follow an alternate analysis that treats the palatalized consonants as sequences of the non-palatalized form and /j/.
Hauge (1999) lists the non-palatalized lateral approximant in Bulgarian as /ɫ/, while most other authors prefer /l/; however, Scatton (1993) describes the same approximant as “markedly velarized except before front vowels” (p. 190). The combination of these opinions has made the /ɫ/ analysis more compelling to me.
Outside of the aforementioned palatalization sequences, /j/ mostly appears immediately after vowels (Scatton 1983, 65), but can also appear word-initially (Scatton 1993, 191).
/ʒ/ is relatively rare, often being realized as /z/ (Scatton 1993, 191).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stops	p b	t d			k ɡ
Affricates		ts	tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ		x
Nasals	m	n
Trills		r
Approximants		ɫ		j
Note: Phonemes to the left of each cell are voiceless and phonemes to the right of each cell are voiced.

Klagstad describes many of the listed vowel phonemes as not in fact being the underlying allophones of their phonemes: his analysis sees [ɛ], [ɔ], and [ɑ] as being underlying rather than /e/, /o/, and /a/. He also describes /ə/ as being realized as [ɯ] in “all positions” (Klagstad 1958, 44–45).
The mid central vowel in Bulgarian is described in a wide variety of ways by different sources, including /ŭ/ (or /ɨ/) (Scatton 1983), /ā/ (Scatton 1993), and /ə/ (Klagstad 1958; Groen 1988). I have opted for /ɤ/ rather than /ə/, given that Klagstad (1958) describes it as a mid-back unrounded vowel, present in both stressed and unstressed syllables (p. 44).
Geminate vowels do not phonemically reduce in Bulgarian (Groen 1988, 186).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	ɛ		ɤ ɔ
Low		a
Note: The mid-back vowel on the left is unrounded.

Non-palatalized variants of each character are listed as the “default” in this section. For rules on how to mark palatalization, see the following subsection.
- Palatalized consonants are not represented by specific standalone graphemes; instead, specific characters are used to mark that the preceding consonant should be palatalized (Hauge 1999, 8). Such examples are detailed below in the chart.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
а	/a/
б	/b/
в	/v/
г	/ɡ/
д	/d/
е	/e/
ж	/ʒ/
з	/z/
и	/i/
й	/j/
к	/k/
л	/ɫ/
м	/m/
н	/n/
о	/o/
п	/p/
р	/r/
с	/s/
т	/t/
у	/u/
ф	/f/
х	/x/
ц	/ts/
ч	/tʃ/
ш	/ʃ/
щ	/ʃtʃ/
ъ	/ɤ/
ь		marks palatalization of preceding consonant
ю	/ju/	marks palatalization of preceding consonant
я	/ja/	marks palatalization of preceding consonant
Digraph
дж	/dʒ/

/j/ deletes before front vowels (Hauge 1999, 11), as well as after palatalized consonants (Scatton 1983, 76–77).
Geminate consonants tend to simplify across morpheme boundaries (Scatton 1983, 71).
/s/ deletes when preceded by a sibilant and followed by /k/ (Scatton 1983, 77).

Vowels nasalize when followed by first a nasal consonant and then a fricative (Hauge 1999, 1).
In consonant clusters, obstruents assimilate to the voicing of the final obstruent in the cluster, and may yield non-phonemic sounds (e.g. [dz]); however, this pattern does not consistently occur before /v/ or /vʲ/ (Klagstad 1958, 47–48; Scatton 1983, 58, 73).
/u/ fronts to [y] after palatalized consonants (Klagstad 1958, 44).
/l/ fronts before front vowels (Klagstad 1958, 48).
Palatalized consonants followed by /a/ tend to alternate with their non-palatalized counterparts before /e/ (Hauge 1999, 9).
Consonants devoice word-finally (Scatton 1983, 73).
Voiceless stops are aspirated in word-initial prevocalic contexts (Klagstad 1958, 47, 49).
/n/ assimilates to [ŋ] before velars (Klagstad 1958, 48); /m/ assimilates to [ɱ] before labiodentals (Hauge 1999, 4).

Groen, B. M. 1988. “The Vocalic System of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian.” Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, 181–92.

Hauge, Kjetil Rå. 1999. A Short Grammar of Contemporary Bulgarian. Slavica Publishers.

Klagstad, Jr., Harold L. 1958. “The Phonemic System of Colloquial Standard Bulgarian.” The Slavic and East European Journal 2: 42–54.

Scatton, Ernest A. 1983. A Reference Grammar of Modern Bulgarian. Slavica Publishers.

———. 1993. “Bulgarian.” In The Slavonic Languages, edited by Comrie, Bernard and Corbett, Greville, 188–98. Routledge.