As I mentioned in an earlier post, Bulgarian is a gendered language, which means that when we use adjectives, we need to make sure they match the gender of the noun they qualify. If you don’t know the difference between a masculine, feminine, or neuter noun, check out my post on the gender of Bulgarian nouns, which will familiarise you with the general rules.

Adjectives also have to match the nouns they qualify in terms of number, so if you use a plural noun, you’ll need to make any adjective plural too. This is surprisingly simple in Bulgarian, which is why I’ve included it in this post, rather than writing a separate one about it.

Changing the gender of a Bulgarian adjective

The stem of a Bulgarian adjective is its masculine form, so it doesn’t need changing when we use it to qualify a masculine noun. For example, стар (old) is both the stem and the masculine form. To make it feminine, we simply add –а to get стара. To make it neuter, we add –o to get старо. In the exceptional cases when a masculine adjective ends in a vowel (such as булгарски), we drop that vowel and replace it with either –а or –о, depending on the gender of the adjective we want to use.

There are, as you can imagine, some other rules to remember too. If the final syllable of an adjective’s stem is ъ, such as in малък (small), when changing the gender, we need to delete this vowel and add the ending corresponding to the gender or plural. For example, we’d end up with малка in the feminine, малко in the masculine, and малки in the plural.

Additionally, when the stem of an adjective ends in -ен, such as интересен (interesting), it loses the е in the other genders and the plural and we attach the regular ending. For example, we get интересна in the feminine, интересно in the neuter, and интересни in the plural. As you can see, it’s a similar process to the one described above. There are other rules too, which I will cover in a future post.

Making a Bulgarian adjective plural

To make an adjective plural we simply need to add –и to the stem or, if the masculine adjective ends in a vowel, we replace the vowel with –и. In the plural, it doesn’t matter which gender the noun is so, like I said above, it’s surprisingly simple. To continue with the above example, we end up with стари. Any masculine adjective ending in -и remains unchanged in the plural.

Gender and plural of adjectives

English	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter	Plural
Bulgarian	булгарски	булгарска	булгарско	булгарски
new	нов	нова	ново	нови
old	стар	стара	старо	стари
young	млад	млада	младо	млади
small	малък	малка	малко	малки
tall	висок	висока	високо	високи
short	нисък	ниска	ниско	ниски
handsome	красив	красива	красиво	красиви
ugly	грозен	грозна	грозно	грозни
good	добър	добра	добро	добри
evil	зъл	зла	зло	зли
interesting	интересен	интересна	интересно	интересни

Indefinite adjectives

You might have clocked “indefinite adjectives” in the caption above and wondered what that was about. An indefinite adjective qualifies an indefinite noun. For example, харесвам стари къщи (I like old houses). This sentence does not refer to any old houses in particular, it is a general statement and therefore indefinite.

In English, if we wanted to refer to specific old houses, we simply place “the” at the beginning of the noun phrase and we’re done, such as “I like the old houses”. In Bulgarian, however, the adjective’s ending changes to perform this function. They would say something like “I like old-the houses”, or харесвам старите къщи. Look out for a future post on this topic where I will cover it properly.