Background: The study of the literary monuments of the New Bulgarian period is one of the challenging issues of the modern historical grammar of the Bulgarian language. It helps to trace as regular and normative the formation and consolidation of those qualitative changes of the Bulgarian linguistic system, which testify to its transition from synthetism to analyticism, as well as give it the status of Balkan and “exotic”. The growth of the scientific interest to these questions proves the emergence of numerous works devoted to a multidimensional study of the manuscripts of the New Bulgarian period, which had not been catalogued yet. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to discover, on the basis of a comparative analysis, the main linguistic features of the Bulgarian damaskins of the XVIII century on the different linguistic levels; to define a set of the most characteristic rarities (archaisms), the linguistic features inherited from the traditional literary language of the church-religious heritage of the previous era as well as “nourished” by the influence of the prestigious Church Slavonic language, which was realized due to the widespread circulation of printed liturgical Church Slavonic books; to identify a complex of progressive innovative processes and phenomena in the linguistic structure that penetrated into the written language from the folk speech; to outline the corpus of linguistic and extralinguistic factors that provoked and supported a similar symbiosis of linguistic means in the written monuments of the New Bulgarian period. Results: The ratio of the concentration of rarities and innovations in the language of the new Bulgarian damaskins was regulated by the notions of the scribes about the linguistic norm (which, on the one hand, blocked the penetration of such features of the folk speech as an article, reprise, etc., and, on the other hand, could not restrain the expansion of some other new Bulgarian innovations as the so called “da”-constructions, analytical way of expressing the relationship between words, etc.), determined by the genre, stylistic and artistic peculiarities of texts, depended on the recipient and the pragmatic purpose. Key words: archaism, innovation, damaskin, the New Bulgarian period, the traditional literary language of the Resava orthography, vernacular language.