The country has expressed concern over the differences between Bulgaria’s Cyrillic and the EU’s Latin alphabets, in response to renewed European Central Bank (ECB) demands that ‘euro’ be spelled and pronounced with a ‘u’ and not a ‘v’ as Bulgarians wish (‘evro’).
In attempts to resolve the issue before Bulgaria joins the EU next year, State Administration Minister Nikolay Vassilev is meeting EU council officials in Brussels on 10 November, there to argue that EU regulations already acknowledge the differences between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, and that the word ‘evro’ is already an official part of the Bulgarian language.
Vassilev said: “For some time, ‘evro’ is the only way that around 8 million Bulgarians pronounce and write the name of the single European currency. Evro is natural in Bulgarian - we say ‘Evropa’ for Europe, ‘Evgeni’ for Eugene, ‘evtanazia for euthanasia’. But the ECB is trying to insist that ‘euro’ in Bulgarian should be written and therefore pronounced in a way which is strange to us. In the Accession Treaty, the ‘euro’ is mentioned many times, and in the Bulgarian version, it is always spelled ‘evro’. Should we modify the Treaty because of European Central Bank linguists? I think not. Why not have a nice € sign instead…and let every race on Earth pronounce it according to their linguistic traditions?”
ECB spokesman Niels Bünemann told EurActiv: "As regards the rules on the spelling of the euro, the relevant decisions were made by the European Council in December 1995 and later by the EC Council in Council Regulation No. 974/98 on the introduction of the euro. The European Council decided that 'the name given to the European currency shall be euro', that 'the name ... must be the same in all the official languages of the European Union, taking into account the existence of different alphabets'. This unambiguous and definitive agreement by the heads of state and government of the member states has been confirmed in all Community legal acts that refer to the euro, in particular also in the above mentioned Regulation (EC) No. 974/98 and later amendments."
