The New National Standard for the Romanization of Bulgarian1

quently became established in Bulgarian practice and was officialized by a series of governmental regulations and legislation. That evolution in the Bulgarian transliteration practice necessitated the development of a new state standard to replace the now-obsolete existing standard BDS 1596:1973. Writing Bulgarian in the Roman alphabet has a long history going back to pre-Cyrillic times [3], medieval rendering of Bulgarian personal and geographic names in Latin language and other European languages using Roman script, and even the introduction of a Latin-scripted Bulgarian literary norm by the Bulgarian community of Banat region (Habsburg Empire, present Romania and Serbia) in 1866 [22]. The practice of Roman spelling of Bulgarian names, terms etc. naturally expanded along with the growth of economic, cultural and scientific communication between Bulgaria and Western Europe since the mid-19 th century, with graphemic correspondences typically patterned on major Euro-pean languages, notably French, German, and most recently English.