How Bulgarian writing works

Bulgarian uses Cyrillic letters, written left to right with spaces between words, and upper and lower case.

Here are mum and cat. Tap play and listen. These pages have no test, and you can come back to them whenever you need.

The modern Bulgarian alphabet has 30 letters. Its six vowel sounds are а, е, и, о, у and ъ. The vowel ъ has its own full sound; it is never the Russian hard sign.

The familiar-looking letters can have unfamiliar sounds: в is v, р is r, с is s.

Some fonts use distinctive Bulgarian small-letter forms. This course marks text as Bulgarian, so a font with Bulgarian localised forms can show them. Later you will practise recognising both common shape families.