Le lingue nella prassi liturgica e predicatoria dei cattolici bulgari (sec. XVII–XIX)
The Languages in the Liturgical and Preaching Practice of the Bulgarian Catholics (XVII–XIX centuries)

Summary/Abstract: The reports and letters of 17th-century Catholic missionaries, primarily those of the Archbishop of Sardika/Sofia Petǎr Bogdan, allow us to draw a picture of the missionaries’ linguistic practice in Bulgarian lands. Latin dominated at the level of liturgical service, the so-called „Illyrian“ Church Slavonic saw sporadic use, and the ecclesiastical „Illyrian“ alternated with the spoken language of the local population in sermons. In the second half of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, the „Illyrian language“ gave way to a spontaneously codified one based on the dialects of southern Bulgarian Catholics (the so-called Pavlikians). The Latin alphabet provided a graphic expression of belonging to Catholicism until the middle of the nineteenth century when it started to give way to the Cyrillic alphabet.

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