Bulgarian Phonetic vs Bulgarian QWERTY on a Mac: Which Is Which

You went to add a Bulgarian keyboard on your Mac and there was no Phonetic in the list. There were two entries, neither of them called that, and one of them was named after QWERTY — which sounds like the wrong thing entirely.

It is a naming problem rather than a missing-feature one. Both arrangements are already installed; the one you are looking for is in the list under a name that does not contain the word you searched for. The rest of this page is where those names come from, and both key maps in full. Both arrangements are also in Mochi Type as separate courses, for when you have chosen.

What macOS actually offers

Open the list of keyboards your Mac can add and there are exactly two Bulgarian entries. Neither of them says Phonetic. One is named after the Bulgarian state standard — the arrangement of a Bulgarian typewriter — and the other after QWERTY, which is the one you are probably after.

Two Bulgarian input sources ship with macOS. On macOS 26.6 their English display names are:

Displayed name	Input source identifier	Arrangement
Bulgarian – Standard	com.apple.keylayout.Bulgarian	БДС typewriter order — ,УЕИШЩ
Bulgarian – QWERTY	com.apple.keylayout.Bulgarian-Phonetic	phonetic order — ЯВЕРТЪ

Where those names come from: I did not read them off a screenshot. They come out of the system’s own name table, /System/Library/Keyboard Layouts/AppleKeyboardLayouts.bundle/Contents/Resources/InfoPlist.loctable, English entries. The dash in both is an en dash, U+2013, which matters only if you are searching a settings window for “Bulgarian - QWERTY” with a hyphen and finding nothing.

You add either one in System Settings ▸ Keyboard ▸ Text Input ▸ Input Sources ▸ Edit…, then add a source and pick Bulgarian.

The equivalence that Apple never stated

Everyone online will tell you that Bulgarian – QWERTY is the phonetic layout. Apple, as far as I could find, has never said it.

The question of whether “Bulgarian – QWERTY” is the phonetic layout has a well-known answer and a weak source, and it is worth separating the two.

On 3 July 2023 a user opened a thread on Apple Support Communities: “I try to set my Bulgarian keyboard, but I have only option for traditional I need phonetic.” The next day Tom Gewecke replied: “Try Bulgarian QWERTY. That’s the same as phonetic.” The thread ran to 25 replies, was never marked solved, and is now closed.

That is a community member, not Apple. I could not find Apple documentation stating that the two names refer to the same arrangement, and this page does not claim Apple renamed anything.

What the system itself contains is narrower and checkable: the input source identifier is com.apple.keylayout.Bulgarian-Phonetic, and the English name mapped to it is “Bulgarian – QWERTY”. Both are facts about files on your Mac. Neither is Apple saying the two words mean the same thing.

There is a further wrinkle in the same thread. On 9 October 2023 another participant wrote: “Bulgarian Qwerty keyboard its OK. I’m used to writing with the new phonetics.” More than one phonetic arrangement is in circulation, and I have not verified which published standard macOS’s key positions follow. So do not take the name as proof it is the one you learned. Compare the actual keys.

The one-key test

You do not need any of that to find out which layout you are typing on at this moment. The two arrangements disagree completely about one very convenient key, and you can settle it in a second without opening a single settings window.

Check your own Mac: press Q.

• Q types я → you are on Bulgarian – QWERTY, the phonetic arrangement.
• Q types , → you are on Bulgarian – Standard, the БДС typewriter arrangement.

That is the fastest discriminator on the whole keyboard, and it works in any text field. I took both layouts directly out of macOS 26.6 with UCKeyTranslate to confirm it.

Both layouts, in full

This is the part to hold up against whatever phonetic layout you already know, because a name is not proof and the keys are. Read it downwards: the Latin letter printed on the key you press, then what that key gives you on each of the two Bulgarian arrangements.

Three rows, read against the US QWERTY key you actually press:

US QWERTY    Q W E R T Y U I O P [ ]
Standard     , у е и ш щ к с д з ц ;
QWERTY       я в е р т ъ у и о п ш щ

US QWERTY    A S D F G H J K L ; '
Standard     ь я а о ж г т н в м ч
QWERTY       а с д ф г х й к л ; '*

US QWERTY    Z X C V B N M , . /
Standard     ю й ъ э ф х п р л б
QWERTY       з ь ц ж б н м , . /

The '* in the QWERTY row is the one entry that is not a direct keystroke: that key is the layout’s dead key, covered two sections down — press it and nothing appears until the next key (' then Space gives the literal apostrophe).

The two keys outside that block — ` and \ — differ too. On Bulgarian – Standard the \ key becomes (, with ) on Shift, and the ` key is a dead key rather than a backtick; see below. On Bulgarian – QWERTY the ` key is ч and the \ key is ю.

Two oddities in the Standard row are not typos. э sits on the V position and ы on Shift+Q — both are Russian letters that Bulgarian does not use, inherited from the typewriter standard.

One dead key on each layout

Each layout keeps one key back as a dead key — press it and nothing appears until you press the next key. It is easy to mistake for a broken keyboard, so it is worth knowing which one.

• Bulgarian – Standard: the ` key. It is not a backtick. ` then Space gives you `; ` followed by a letter key gives a Cyrillic letter from outside the Bulgarian alphabet — `+S → џ, +D → ђ, +F → ї, +W → љ, +E → ѓ, +R → є, +Z → ў, +C → њ, +V → ћ. Shift on that key still types ~ directly.
• Bulgarian – QWERTY: the ' key, with the same job — ' then Space for a literal apostrophe, '+A → ђ, '+Q → џ, '+E → ѓ, '+Y → њ, '+U → љ, '+I → є, '+O → ї. Shift on that key still types " directly, so the double quote in the table below is a single keystroke; the apostrophe is two.

Neither dead key touches a Bulgarian letter. All 30 stay single, unshifted keystrokes on both layouts.

Both layouts also lose the backslash outright: \ and | are on neither, and Option on that key produces the curly quotes ‘ and ’ instead.

The real cost is the punctuation, not the letters

Everyone compares the letters. The letters are the easy half: 30 positions either way, learned by drilling. What decides how much of your existing muscle memory survives is where the punctuation went.

Take the ten marks that carry ordinary prose — . , ! ? " - ; : ( ) — and ask which US QWERTY key produces each one:

Mark	Bulgarian – Standard	Bulgarian – QWERTY
.	the = key	.
,	the Q key	,
!	Shift+1	Shift+1
?	Shift+2	Shift+/
"	Shift+4	Shift+’
-	-	-
;	the ] key	;
:	Shift+7	Shift+;
(	the \ key	Shift+9
)	Shift+\	Shift+0

On Bulgarian – QWERTY all ten sit exactly where US QWERTY puts them. On Bulgarian – Standard eight of the ten move, including the two you press most. That is the honest summary of the switching cost, and it is why people who write code or bilingual text tend to end up on the QWERTY arrangement even when they admire the other one.

Standard has its own logic underneath. Shift+0 gives №, and the two keys right of 0 carry Roman numerals — Shift on - gives I, Shift on = gives V. That is a typewriter, faithfully preserved.

One asymmetry in Standard’s favour: four of those marks come back in their US places on the Option layer, with their US Shift partners attached. Option+, is a comma and Option+Shift+, is <; the same holds for Option+. / >, Option+; / :, and Option+/ / ?. The straight double quote is the one that does not come back — Option+Shift+' gives the curly ”.

Latin letters, and the letter that is not missing

Two worries come up constantly here, and both turn out to be nothing. You do not have to keep switching back to English to type an English word — the whole Latin alphabet is still there, one modifier key away. And no Bulgarian letter is missing from either layout, including the one people keep reporting as missing.

Both Bulgarian layouts put the entire Latin alphabet on the Option layer, in QWERTY order. Option+Q is q, Option+Shift+Q is Q, and so on across all 26. You can type a Latin word or a filename without changing input source.

That handles the other recurring complaint on that Apple thread — “There is a letter missing”, where the letter named was ь. I checked all 30 letters of the Bulgarian alphabet against both layouts. Every one is on an unshifted key — ь included, on A for Standard and X for QWERTY — and neither layout composes any of them from a dead key. The phonetic arrangement fits 30 letters onto 26 alphabetic keys by borrowing four: ч on `, ш on [, щ on ], ю on \. Of those four displaced marks, [ and ] come straight back on Option, the backtick comes back only as a dead grave, and the backslash does not come back at all.

The character people actually hunt for is ѝ, U+045D — the stressed pronoun, distinct from и. It is Shift on the ь key on both layouts: Shift+A on Standard, Shift+X on QWERTY. The consequence is that neither layout has a capital Ь anywhere on its Shift layer — Caps Lock still produces it on the same key, if you ever need one. Apple spent the Shift position on ѝ, which is the right call for a letter that never begins a Bulgarian word.

Which to learn

One rule, and it is not about speed.

Learn Bulgarian – Standard if you will type Bulgarian on machines that are not yours — an office, a university lab, a colleague’s keyboard in Sofia. It is the arrangement named after the Bulgarian state standard, and the one a keyboard sold with Cyrillic legends is most likely to have printed on its keys. I could not verify that last part beyond it being the common report, so take it as the reason people give rather than something I checked.

Learn Bulgarian – QWERTY if your Bulgarian typing happens on your own Mac and you already touch-type Latin. Nineteen of the 30 letters land on the Latin key that shares their sound, so the actual memorisation is eleven positions: в ж й ц ч ш щ ъ ь ю я. Everything else — the punctuation, the digits, your muscle memory for Shift — carries over intact.

The same three-way naming muddle exists in Russian, with the same resolution and a different set of moved keys; which Russian layout to learn on a Mac covers that one.

Practising either Bulgarian layout in Mochi Type

A layout is learned by repetition against a specific key map, which means the trainer has to know the same key map macOS does.

Mochi Type has both Bulgarian arrangements built in, listed as “Bulgarian” and “Bulgarian (Phonetic)”. The part that matters on this page is that it works out which key you pressed from the key itself, not from the letter macOS hands it. So you can spend an evening drilling Bulgarian – Standard with your Mac still set to US QWERTY: nothing you type outside the app changes, and no input source has to be added. The key maps it drills you against were taken out of the macOS layout files themselves and are re-checked against the live system.

If you do want the mechanical version: it ships both, each compatible with ANSI and ISO keyboards. Its tables are machine-extracted from the macOS layout files themselves and diffed against the live system across 48 key codes and four modifier states. I ran that diff for both Bulgarian layouts against macOS 26.6 while writing this page: zero differences on either. (It compares the glyph each key produces, which is what a drill needs; the two dead keys above are not part of that comparison, and no Bulgarian letter depends on them.) The mechanism behind drilling one layout while your Mac is set to another is that it resolves your keystrokes from the physical key code, not from what macOS translates them into — set out in full in practising a layout without switching input source. Speed can be shown in characters per minute rather than words, under View ▸ Speed Unit ▸ Characters Per Minute (CPM); CPM is WPM × 5.

Four honest limits, because they change whether it is worth your time.

The Bulgarian course is one hand-balanced letter order, and it was balanced against БДС. Counting each letter’s key by standard touch-typing finger assignment, the eleven letter groups end at 43 % left / 57 % right on Standard and 53/47 on QWERTY — but the route matters more than the endpoint, and after four stages you are at 46/54 on Standard against 62/38 on QWERTY. A phonetic learner gets a sequence tuned for the other layout. What is per-layout is the progress track and the statistics: switching layout starts a separate course and separate per-key numbers.

Bulgarian content is five frequency tiers — 198, 970, 4,794, 9,612 and 47,990 words — plus a 649-entry set of commonly misspelled words. There are no Bulgarian movie or book quote sets and no Bulgarian built-in books; the bundled books exist only in English, German, Russian and Ukrainian. You can import your own .txt, .md, .rtf or .epub instead.

None of the Bulgarian word sets contains ѝ, so the app will never score you on it. Five typing faces are available on Bulgarian rather than six, because the dyslexia-friendly face covers Latin only.

None of which you need in order to use this page — the two tables above are the answer to the question, and they are the same tables whatever you practise with.

And if the question is still Standard against Phonetic, it is cheaper to answer by hand than by argument. The free tier — five course stages per language plus the Top 200 word list — is enough for an evening on each, with your Mac still on US QWERTY; past that it is a one-time $12.99 unlock.