On the use of masculine nouns to denote females in Bulgarian (survey results)

This article presents the results of a survey made with 35 non-philologists and shows their preferences in gender selection and agreement when referring to persons of female gender. The survey was made in order to test certain claims in research articles on this subject, and to establish to what degree this use is present in the spoken language and whether it shows vacillation. As the informants were not chosen with the aim to form a representative sample, the results are interpreted from a purely linguistic, not sociolinguistic, point of view.