Immigrants in Sofia between nonstandard and Standard Bulgarian

Bulgaria was no exception to the urban booms typical of the twentieth century, and Sofia could be regarded as a good example in this respect. In the mid-twentieth century, most of the immigrants in Sofia had come from the lands to the west and southwest of the city, over which several dramatic wars were fought. Within the last four decades, new waves of immigration due to socialist projects have changed the demographic and environmental balance in the region. Regarding the urban center and the fringe as a sociocultural diasystem, the recent social history of the city was analyzed. The article presents the main results of a sociolinguistic investigation carried out in one of the typical areas inhabited by immigrants from Macedonia (the Gevgeli Quarter) at the end of the 1980s. A sociolinguistic methodology of Labov's and Trudgill's kind was applied to a Slavic language and a social context considerably different from that found in West-European and North American cities. The interpretation of the results concerns some complex interactions between nonstandard and standard language varieties

Archaeology · Bulgarian · Geography · Immigration · Linguistics · Slavic languages · Sociolinguistics · Sociology · Classics · History · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity