The official language is Bulgarian, spoken by about 90 percent of the population. Turkish is the largest minority language. See Bulgarian Language; Turkish Language. For more than 40 years the Bulgarian government promoted atheism, to which an estimated 65 percent of the population subscribed in the early 1980s. The governmental reform of the late 1980s loosened religious restrictions, however, and by the 1990s 85 percent of the population belonged to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (an Eastern Orthodox branch), while another 13 percent were followers of Islam. There are also Jews, Roman Catholics, Uniate Catholics, and Protestants