page_title: Yat
section_title: Bulgarian
hierarchical_section_title: Yat / History / Bulgarian
caption_attribution_description: Български: Розовите линии очертават границите между диалектите с изговор дедо, бел и диалектите с изговор дядо, бял (&lt; старобълг. дѣдъ, бѣлъ). Диалектите с друг изговор на ятовата гласна не са вземани предвид при очертаването на границите. Данните са според обобщаващия том на Български диалектен атлас. English: Yat border between the Bulgarian dialects.
context_page_description: Yat or jat is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet.
  There is also another version of Yat, the iotified Yat, which is a Cyrillic character combining a decimal I and a yat. There was no numerical value for this letter and it was not in the Glagolitic alphabet. It was encoded in Unicode 5.1 at positions U+A652 and U+A653.
context_section_description: In Bulgarian, the different reflexes of the yat form the so-called yat border (ятова граница), running approximately from Nikopol on the Danube to Solun (Thessaloniki) on the Aegean Sea. The yat border is the most important Bulgarian isogloss. West of that isogloss, old yat is always realized as /ɛ/ (a continuation of the Ekavian Serbian dialects). East of it, the reflexes of yat prototypically alternate between /ja/ or /ʲa/ (in stressed syllables when not followed by a front vowel) and /ɛ/ (in all other cases). After World War II, Literary Bulgarian was based on the pronunciation of the eastern dialects. Some examples of the alternation in the standard language follow:
  mlyako (milk) [n.]  → mlekar (milkman); mlechen (milky), etc.
  syadam (sit) [vb.] → sedalka (seat); sedalishte (seat, e.g. of government), etc.
  svyat (world) [adj.] → svetoven (worldly); svetski (secular), etc.
  From the liberation of Bulgaria until 1945, the standard Bulgarian orthography did not reflect this alternation and used the Cyrillic letter yat for both /ja/ and /e/ in alternating roots. This was regarded as a way to maintain unity between Eastern and Western Bulgarians, as much of what was then seen as Western Bulgarian dialects was under foreign control. In 1945 the letter was removed from the Bulgarian alphabet and the spelling was changed to conform to the Eastern pronunciation.
caption: Bulgarian "Yat border".
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