Bulgarian Special Letters Cheatsheet

Bulgarian Cyrillic looks almost identical to Russian at a glance, but two letters behave completely differently, and they are the two in the table above. Ъ, called er golyam or big er, and ь, called er malak or small er, are the same shapes as the Russian hard and soft signs but do not do the same jobs. If you are reading Bulgarian with Russian expectations, these are the letters that will mislead you.

The crucial difference is that Bulgarian ъ is a real vowel with a real sound — a mid central vowel close to the u in the English word cut. It is not a silent modifier. It appears in enormous numbers of everyday words: България, пъб, съм, път, and the definite article suffix -ът. This means ъ can carry stress, can begin a syllable, and cannot be omitted or approximated. Russian speakers learning Bulgarian consistently underestimate this letter because in their own language it is nearly silent and nearly invisible.

Bulgarian ь, by contrast, has been reduced to a single narrow function. It appears only in the combination ьо, and only after a consonant, in words like шофьор and Ньютон. It never appears at the end of a word, never after a vowel, and never anywhere else. Bulgarian orthography reforms progressively stripped away its other uses, and what remains is essentially one spelling pattern. If you see ь anywhere except before о in a Bulgarian text, it is almost certainly an error or Russian text mislabelled as Bulgarian.

There is also a typographic point worth knowing. Bulgarian Cyrillic has its own preferred letterforms that differ from Russian ones for several lowercase letters — в, г, д, ж, з, и, к, л, п, т, ц, ш and щ all have distinctly Bulgarian cursive-derived shapes. These are font variants selected by language tagging, not different characters, so marking your text as Bulgarian rather than Russian lets a well-made font display them correctly. Text that looks subtly Russian to a Bulgarian reader is usually a missing language tag rather than a wrong character.

On Windows, the standard approach is the Bulgarian BDS layout, the traditional typewriter arrangement, which places ъ prominently because the language needs it constantly. There is also a phonetic layout that maps Cyrillic letters onto their nearest Latin key positions, which many people find easier if they already touch-type on QWERTY. Alt codes for Cyrillic depend on the active codepage and are not dependable across applications. On macOS, choose the Bulgarian input source and pick between the standard and phonetic variants. On Linux, the same two variants are available in the Bulgarian layout options.