LANGUAGE DEMOCRATIZATION AND LANGUAGE CULTURE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PUBLIC SPEECH

This article deals with the democratization of the Bulgarian literary language, interpreted in its fouraspects: social, functional, personal and interstructural. Pseudodemocratization processes and trends are discussed and anumber of examples are given. The general conclusion is that, in its overall development, the modern literary language isundoubtedly democratized, and this is a long-standing trend whose aim was, and should continue to be, to raise the demos tothe literary language in the future. Standardology experts’ modern assessment of the normalisation and codification of modernliterary language is that they are extremely democratized in every respect: in terms of spelling, form and word usage, andspelling. In retrospect, changes have been made progressively and without turmoil, with public debate towards thedemocratization of the literary language according to the four commentary criteria although they were not consciously orexplicitly stated. A really important task for the Bulgarian codifiers today, however, is to find the mechanisms that will protectthe Bulgarian language community from pseudo-democratization from the false notion that everything is allowed, thatdemocratization has a utilitarian side, but is not in simplification. The task of the modern codifier, in other words, is not tolower the codification to the demos, but rather to raise the demos to it