Turkic theory

The most widely accepted theory today is that the now extinct Bulgar language belongs to a distant branch of the Turkic languages, broadly classified as Bulgar Turkic, whose only living representative is the Chuvash language[1], thus the Bulgars were a Turkic people.[2][3][4][5][6] It is supported, among other things, by the facts that some Bulgar words contained in the few surviving stone inscriptions,[7] and in other documents (mainly military and hierarchical terms such as tarkan, bagatur, and probably kan and kanartikin "prince") appear to be of Turkic origin, that the Bulgars apparently used a 12-year cyclic calendar similar to the one adopted by Turkic and Mongolian peoples from the Chinese, with names and numbers that are deciphered as Turkic, and that the Bulgars' supreme god was probably called Tangra, a deity widely known among the Turkic peoples under names such as Tengri, Tura etc..[8] Some also point out the presence of a (fairly small) number of Turkic loanwords in the Slavic Old Bulgarian language, and the fact that the Bulgars used an alphabet similar to the Turkic Orkhon script, although this alphabet hasn't been satisfactorily deciphered yet: fortunately, the Bulgar inscriptions were sometimes written in Greek or Cyrillic characters, most commonly in Greek, thus allowing the scholars to identify some of the Bulgar glosses. Accordingly, the name Bulgar is derived from the Turkic verb bulģa "to mix, shake, stir" and its derivative bulgak "revolt, disorder"