alternatehistory.com

Take a look at this map of Bulgaria as of 814 AD:

francia814a.gif

Notice how the outline of "Bulgaria" at this stage resembles to a great degree the modern shape of Romania. To a degree its like an enlarged Romania with the northern half of modern Bulgaria, a corner of northeast Serbia and alot of eastern Hungary.

The Bulgars eventually lost the territories to the north, they were conquered at one point by the Byzantines and in their later incarnations they occupied territories further south, either closely tracking with modern Bulgaria or with modern Serbia and Macedonia, depending on the century.

What if the Bulgarians kept most of their territory north of the Danube, at a minimum Wallachia, Dobruja, Moldavia and Transylvania until at least 1400 AD? If the Byzantines do a counteroffensive, it never takes away their territories north of the Danube.

How would the Bulgarian language of the ATL compare and contrast with OTL Bulgarian?

In OTL the Bulgars were a conquering Turkic speaking people who merged ethnolinguistically with slavic people they ruled, leading to Bulgarian becoming a basically south Slavic language.

If the medieval core of Bulgaria remained north of the Danube, would Bulgarian have remained a turkic language? Or would it have absorbed more romance elements from Romanian/Aromanian? Or would it be about as slavic as OTL Bulgarian?
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