Mariya Bagasheva-Koleva SWU- Blagoevgrad m_bagasheva@abv.bg Emotional Language in Fairy Tales A contrastive analysis of the expressive means used in fairy tales in English, Russian and Bulgarian Abstract This paper analyses the emotional language in some Russian fairy tales and the ways it is projected (or not) into Bulgarian and English translated versions. More specifically, it investigates the abundant use of diminutives in Russian fairy tales and gives an account of the quantitative and qualitative translation of such forms into Bulgarian and English. The aim of the present paper is to explore the linguistic ways in which the emotional language in Russian fairy tales can be translated or transformed into Bulgarian and English, as well as to argue that in English, unlike Russian and Bulgarian, fairy tales are presented more as literary texts than as a source of emotional lexis. Key terms: emotional language, emotionality, diminutives, expressiveness, emotion words. *** Fairy tales are a mighty industry today together with their film and video adaptations. They provide texts rich in language figures loaded with value-formative associative meaning. As such, they form a field of linguistic research where comparative studies have been done between such languages as Russian, French, German and English, but there is no systematic data-base concerning Bulgarian emotive language and its projections into English. Although children’s language has been an object of constant studies, there is but hardly any research of the comparative values of such important features of a fairy tale language as diminutives. Vladimir Prop, in his ‘Morphology of the Folk Tale’ (1928), analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to indentify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. Prop dealt with the folk tales as narrative structures and analyzed their elements – stages of action and characters, but removed all verbal considerations from the analysis, as well as all considerations of tone, mood, character, even though the folktale’s form is almost always oral. In his other famous book about folk tales – “The Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale’(1946) – Prop examined the origin of specific folktale motifs in customs and beliefs, initiation rites. But he paid no attention to folktale language. It is worth examining folktale language because it represents the oral tradition in narration, it reflects the national, cultural, social and linguistic differences of people. Studying differences