L as ў – Deviation from the Norm or Imposing Norm?

Abstract

During the last 40 years, the articulation of [l] as [ǔ] has gradually become too ex-pansive in contemporary Bulgarian speech. It is actually a labiovelar articulation of the lateral consonant /l/, which in our previous studies we denoted as the sound [ǔ]. In separate articles over the years, the attitude towards this articulation has been dynamic – from "mannered", "defective", "new articulation", to "mass practice", "expansive phenomenon" and "natural realization". In this way, from the rare occurrences in the youth slangs of the capital city, gradually this phonetic phenomenon passed into a speech norm for Bulgarians regardless of their dialect affiliation and social status. So, from a deviation from the norm, as it is perceived years ago, given the codified stand-ard articulation in the grammars of the Bulgarian language, today we could say that we have an active bilabial articulation instead of the alveodental articulation of the consonant /l/, which is not described in any of the official Bulgarian grammars. In this article, we trace the path of this sociophonetic phenomenon from the classification of the consonant /l/ in Bulgarian grammars since 1930s through its changing status in the past 40 years to nowadays perceived almost as an imperceptibly imposed norm, subject to institutional perception and description.