Following the spirit of my previous article I will now ask a question: OK. We are careless about our language, but why? Some people will say- we have so many other things to care about (O, come on! I don’t ask for money!). Others will say- is there a problem, because we don’t see it (Are you blind!), why should we do something to change the foreign words with native neologisms. These both show that people really don’t understand the importance of this problem- nowadays language is the only thing that defines a nation. Years ago people said that there are three things that did this- religion, history and language. Nowadays less and less people are religious (I mean really, not just obeying the rituals and celebrating) and history- do I have to comment this- so many times people changed the aspect from which we look at the events and so many times there were new and startling turning points because of new discoveries that we can’t distinguish the real fact from the newest sensation based on speculations. And even if we could now people are so mixed that it is really impossible if we try to put a person in a certain nation using these criteria. So, the only thing left is the mother language of the person. And if these were not enough for skeptics, I’ll just add- if we don’t try to develop it our language will die. And a note- putting newly borrowed words in our lexis only pollutes is, it doesn’t become more developed- it only merges with other languages. Thus we just consciously kill it and nothing else. Think for a while- if we continue in the same way, will in ten years’ time our language be „език свещен не моите деди” or it will be just “something that I can’t exactly define but it really sounds like English, although they don’t use the correct word order”. That’s why we should try to preserve our language- and this can happen by doing only one thing- trying to substitute foreign words with native neologisms. This doesn’t harm the language- it is like a surgery- it pains it the beginning but it is for the best. And, of course, some people would say that this is against the moral- consciously to try to influence a language- I’ll answer- everything we do (applying the grammar rules, for example) is a conscious influence on a language. When we put new words of foreign origin in it we do the same. And it is our right as the main “users” of the language- it is up to us whether we’ll do it the right or the wrong way.

And now let me ask you something- which is the first neologism in Bulgarian that comes to your mind? Is it something simple like „възлед” or „излет”, or something strange- sounding like „посткомунистически” „антикорупционен”? Do we study at school that newly created words can be really useful and useable? I think that’s a problem- we somehow subconsciously assume that new words in our language can be created only through using some foreign prefixes and roots. Because it is simpler for us- we are not as seriously taught Bulgarian as we are taught any other language. That’s why we don’t know our language and its great potential. I really wish we were more responsible for our language! We shouldn’t think it is normal to have a lot of foreign words in our lexis- languages with fewer speakers than ours have more native words than we do- they are more enthusiastic about substituting international words with native ones (for example, in Hungarian, Slovenian and Finnish they have a native word for “computer”). They know that every language, no matter if it has 100 or 100 000 speakers, is a big wealth and for the native speakers it is even bigger wealth because it is theirs, it defines them as a nation. Our language has helped, helps, and I hope will help us realize who we are. However, we should help it too AND NOW…

I would like to say a few words about the people who struggle for language which has not many loanwords and foreign words. They are called purists but we always pronounce this word with some disgust, as if they are crazy people who want something impossible and don’t make anything useful- when there was purism in Bulgaria people thought this. In fact that’s not true- because of these people we have preserved a lot of words, which have had foreign equivalents and we even now have a lot of the words they created for some events, new for their time. And the wish for relatively clean of not native words language is not a utopia- it successfully exists in a European country. Please, read this! I admire these people- we should follow their example. If someone could hear me…