Reading the Alphabet (Well, at least the Road Signs)

Don't worry - buying property in Bulgaria does not mean, you have to learn to speak Bulgarian. Buying property in Bulgaria also does not mean, you have to learn the Bulgarian alphabet (Cyrillic). Like in most countries where a big part of the GDP is coming from tourism, you will get along well in Bulgaria by just speaking English. Most people will understand you and most will speak at least a Basic English.

And of course, when you are buying property in Bulgaria, all contracts, all legal papers will be in English and your lawyer will make sure that you understand everything 100 percent. We from Property Checkpoint would not want it anyway different! We understand very well that buying property in Bulgaria, investing your hard earned money in a foreign country, is a very exciting and sometimes even stressful endeavour. Therefore we will make absolute certain that everything will be done in your language and that you have as much understanding and certainty about the process of buying property in Bulgaria as humanly possible.

Nevertheless, we also thought, when you are buying property in Bulgaria, it might be a nice thing, to be able, to read the road signs and maybe the headlines of the newspapers. Therefore we decided, to put a short introduction and description of the Cyrillic script on our website.

Bulgarian is an indo-european language and it was actually the first Slavic language to be written. It is spoken in Bulgaria and in parts of Greece, Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia and Turkey. All in all there are about 12 - 14 million people worldwide who speak Bulgarian. The writing is done in the Cyrillic script with 30 letters and this is, since January 1, 2007 the third official alphabet in the EU.

On the following tables you can find the letters of the Bulgarian alphabet and the values of the International Phonetic Alphabet, for the sound of each letter.

(For more information about IPA, please have a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA)





Nowadays, it gets more and more common, to write in Latin script. The majority of road signs and street signs are written in Cyrillic and Latin. Except in Sofia - here the signs are only in the Cyrillic script.

As afore mentioned, you do not need to read, write or speak Bulgarian, when buying property in Bulgaria. So we won't go any deeper into the material. Should you be interested in learning more about the Bulgarian language, just have a look at Wikipedia.

On a final note:
When buying property in Bulgaria, it might be a nice thing if you could at least say "Hello" and "Good Bye" to your neighbours, even if you don't speak any Bulgarian at all. So in the following, we will give you some common phrases, which might be helpful when you are buying property in Bulgaria.

Bulgarian >>	English	Bulgarian >>	English
Dobro utro	Good Morning	Dobar den	Good Day
Dobar vecher	Good Evening	Leka nosht	Good Night
Dobre	All Right	Kak si or Kak ste	How are you?
Govorite li anglinski?	Do you speak English?