We are proud of the fact that with Bulgaria’s EU accession on 1 January 2007 Bulgarian language became one of the official languages of the union, and the Cyrillic alphabet became the third alphabet to be officially used in EU, Bulgaria’s prime-minister Sergei Stanishev said at his meeting with EU’s commissioner on multilinguism Leonard Orban, who arrived in Bulgaria to participate in the celebrations for the Day of Bulgarian Language and Culture.

Orban assured Stanishev he was actively working on Bulgaria’s EU integration – not only regarding its language, but in all other spheres as well. Opportunities to support Bulgarian language and culture, including financial, are much bigger now – take advantage of them, Orban added.

Our country is dialogic and understands EU rules, but we will try to persuade EU institutions that for Bulgarians the obligation to write out and pronounce the single European currency as “euro” would be unacceptable.

Sergei Stanishev expressed Bulgaria’s firm intention to continue to defend its right to write the common European currency as “evro”. This is our specifics and expression of our identity that we are bound to preserve within the EU. The word “evro” is adopted in Bulgaria’s EU accession agreement and is established in the contemporary literary language, Stanishev explained.

Orban agreed the word “evro” was a part of the Bulgarian tradition and cultural identity – you should defend your position till the end, you have strong arguments in your support, the commissioner said.