Communication in Bulgaria

How do Bulgarian teenagers communicate?

Introduction The way we, the teenagers, communicate is thoroughly

influenced by our daily life. We go to school, meet our classmates and friends and as we do this we put our ideas and opinions across, share our thoughts and gain knowledge about the surrounding world. Communication is an inherent part of our life and we can’t imagine living in a world without our friends and all those cutting-edge appliances which help us keep in touch with them.

Classmates, tests and the most creative ways to get yourself across

Hard lessons and pleasant chats

Classmates, test and the most creative ways to get yourself across School means teachers with whom we have to

communicate, but of course our classmates too who help us get through the day.

At school we communicate all the time. In breaks, during the lessons and even during tests. It’s remarkable how imaginative we, teenagers, can be, when trying to find new, more effective ways to communicate our thoughts. We write messages on pieces of paper, develop our lip-reading, make signs with hands, which only our closest friends distinguish, or draw pictures.

Let’s not forget that the most pleasant chats always take place while the teacher is speaking.

What you can see in the right picture is not a typical lesson. The reason why everybody is so attentive and looking in the same direction is that everybody knew that a picture was being taken. On the contrary, the real behavior of students looks more like this in the other picture.

Another example of the communication in the classes is the following slide. In the first picture you see students carrying out a presentation and at the same moment the others disregard them.

Projects and presentations

These are supposed to be listening carefully but..

Tests and the unique abilities of students to find a way to cheat

XXX.. No testing today

It’s testing time Let’s imagine the following situation. It’s testing time

and all the students are panicking. All kinds of prompts are written on suspiciously small pieces of paper- formulas, numbers and other useful stuff. The teacher distributes the tests and all spy techniques and appliances start to work throughout the lesson.

Testing is the time when most active and efficient communication takes place. Everybody’s trying to help and all well-known cheating techniques come into play. Whispers, signs with hands, the best lip-reading and of course the favourite one- distracting the teacher while everybody else manages to get the correct answer.

Is there a better example of how effectively teenagers can communicate? :D

XXX- superstition- if you write XXX on your wrist you won’t be tested or examined that day.

The circle of friends

Friends and late nights

The folklore of the set

The circle of friends In our closest circle of friends we can do or say everything.

There we don’t bother what others think of us. In our friends’ company we share our dreams and desires, our doubts and fears, our ideas and opinions freely. We are sure they will support us.

What we do when we go out is hardly a secret. We all have our favourite places-cafes, clubs and discos, we buy our favourite drinks and start gossiping, complaining or joking and, of course, we put the world to rights!

The most important thing is that at such moments we feel safe and reveal our true selves.

In the set we have our own nicknames, stories, jokes, memories. We sometimes speak a language, which people outside our circle cannot understand, because we use words which have their own meanings in the folklore of our group. In my group, for example, everybody has a nickname.

Clubs, teams and all kinds of pastime activities

Amateur dance groups

Sport teams

Clubs, teams and all kinds of pastime activities Other factors which enhance our communication are

all the sport teams, social clubs amateur theatre, dance groups, and other activities we participate in.

Dancing is a vivid means of conveying ideas.Last year one of the dance groups in our town, in which teenagers perform modern ballet, carried out an unforgettable performance. It was about the problem of aggression and violence among young people. Their message was that no matter how different teenagers are, they can overcome the differences and cope with the problems together, as a team.

Volunteer organizations

In Ruse, my home town, there is an organization which unites young people to tackle problems such as human trafficking, AIDS prevention and violence among teenagers and their families. In this club young people give presentations and lectures which help to cope with those problems. The members organize concerts. Music has always been a powerful communicator. Through music young people explain their causes. They gather more support and their causes get more popularity.

On the World AIDS Day the teenage members of the club organised a flash mob. Its purpose was to unite more young people for the cause.

In these organisations we communicate on a different, a bit more formal level but they are extremely important for us because we develop many social and people skills. We become better communicators

What influences the way we communicate?The E-

generation

The Gossip

Exit and Enter are gradually

taking Ctrl over us

What influences the way we communicate? A famous Bulgarian journalist names us the E generation, E

like Exit and Enter. According to him our generation not only types on the computer, it also lives in it. It’s a generation born from the revolution in technologies. A great part of our lives happen in the virtual reality- there we find friends, we find our identity or more precisely- we form our identity there all the time.

Internet and the well-known phenomenon FACEBOOK are major means of communication among young people. In Bulgaria the famous Facebook is called КЛЮКАРНИКЪТ or THE GOSSIP.

The language we speak

The hybrid language and the emoticons

6=sh=ш4=ch=ч

supposed to be

funny..

We can think

over it

The language we speak We often complain that we are misunderstood. One reason is that

we speak a different language. Unlike adults, we mostly share emotions, not thoughts. We are more influenced by all cutting-edge technologies and that’s the reason why our parents and grandparents sometimes fail to understand us.

The different language suits perfectly to the things we want to experience and share. When chatting we use a hybrid language- some Bulgarian, some English, lots of punctuation marks and of course- emoticons.

When I prepared this presentation I looked through some chat history for an example without an emoticon and I couldn’t find a single one.This is the one with the fewest.

The hybrid language is referred to as “Shliokavica” (s.th of extremely poor quality), “Maimunica”,(Monkeyese) - it uses Latin letters for Bulgarian words and as there is no full correspondence as in cyrillic it’s a mess. We use the figures 4 and 6 (chetiri and shest,) the initial sounds of chetiri (4) and shest (6) correspond to these sounds “ch” and “sh”. These sounds correspond to letters in the Bulgarian alphabet, but when chatting in Bulgarian we don’t switch to cyrillic and we use these for short.

Thank you for your attention!