Bulgarian member of the European parliament for the Socialist Party Kristian Vigenin has asked the European Commission to step in to protect Bulgarian culture and language.

According to the MEP, the language was suppressed because Bulgarians were charged twice for the same number of characters in SMS messages sent in Cyrillic.

When sending an SMS, the text is encoded using a technology called the Mobile Application Part (MAP). The maximum size of a message sent with this technology is 1120 bits.

Depending on the alphabet being used for the SMS, this means a message can contain between 160 and 70 characters.

The standard seven-bit alphabet, which provides all Latin characters, including accented ones, is mandatory on all handsets as it is the default alphabet and provides 160 characters per message. Cyrillic, like Arabic, Chinese, Korean or Japanese, must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 or Unicode character encoding, with which a message can contain only 70 characters.

Because of this, Vigenin said, Bulgarians are charged twice as much for the same number of characters in a message.

"Regardless of any technical difficulties or additional costs for the companies, I believe that the principle of equality and non-discrimination of EU citizens are basic principles which cannot be sacrificed for economic efficiency," Vigenin said.

"The single market is one of the greatest achievements of the EU. There is a clear inequality among EU citizens and discrimination against certain languages," Vigenin said.

Vigenin called on the Communications Regulation Commission (CRC) and its head Veselin Bozhkov to take concrete action to eliminate discriminatory factors, a media statement from Vigenin's press office said.

The alphabet that is actually used when sending an SMS depends on the settings of the subscriber's handset.