The Banat Bulgarians are a Bulgarian minority group, living mostly in the Romanian part of the historical region of the Banat. They are Roman Catholic by confession and stem from groups of Paulicians from northern and northwestern Bulgaria (around Nikopol, Chiprovtsi, Svishtov). The Banat Bulgarians have been inhabiting the region since the 17th century and speak a distinctive codified form of the Eastern Bulgarian vernacular with German, Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian lexical influences.
According to unnoficial data, there are about 12,000 Bulgarians living in the Romanian and 3,000 in the Serbian Banat. The official Romanian censuses state that 6,500 people of Bulgarian origin inhabit the Romanian part of the region.
The Banat Bulgarians are represented by the Bulgarian Union of the Banat - Romania, which issues the newspaper Nasha Glas and the magazine Literaturna misal.
History
The resettlement of Bulgarian Paulicians in the Banat began after the unsuccesful Chiprovtsi Uprising against Ottoman rule in 1688 and series of Hungarian-Turkish and Austrian-Turkish wars. They crossed the Danube in a search for better life conditions outside the Ottoman Empire after long negotiations with Austrian rulers, which eventually led to giving them the right to settle in then-Austrian Transylvania and the Banat, where they founded the villages (Star) Beshenov (1738), which, inhabited by 3,200, is the modern centre of Banat Bulgarians, and Vinga (1741), located north and northwest of Timişoara.
At first, the Banat Bulgarians inhabited only the parts of the region north of the Danube, but single groups moved south into Serbia in the middle of the 19th century.
After the liberation of Bulgaria in 1878 and the formation of the Principality of Bulgaria, many Bulgarians from the Banat decided to move back to Western Bulgaria, although the severe consequences of World War I forced some of them to once again migrate to the Banat.
Language
The vernacular of the Bulgarians of the Banat can be classified as belonging to those of Eastern Bulgaria. A typical feature is the "ы" vowel, which can either take an etymological place or replace "i". Other characteristic phonological features are the "ê" (wide "e") reflex of the Old Church Slavonic yat and the reduction of "o" into "u" and rarer of "e" into "i": pule instead of pole (field), selu instead of selo (village), ugnishti instead of ognishte (fireplace). Another Eastern Bulgarian sign is the softening of final consonants, which is typical for other Slavic languages, but found only in dialects in Bulgarian (tavan sounds like what would be rendered as tavanj in Serbian, for example).
Lexically, the language of the Banat Bulgarians has borrowed many words from languages such as German (drot from Draht — wire; gang from Gang — anteroom, corridor) and Hungarian (perna — feather-pillow) due to the close contacts with the other peoples of multiethnical Banat. Loanwords constitute 20% of the Banat Bulgarian vocabulary.
The Banat Bulgarian language uses a script of its own, based on the Croatian version of the Latin script, and preserves many features that are archaic in the language spoken in Bulgaria. The language was codified as early as 1866 and is used in literature and press, which distinguishes it from plain dialects.