A South Slavic language, Macedonian is spoken as a first language by about 2–3 million people chiefly in Macedonia. It has a large number of borrowings from the Turkish language and a significant number from the Greek language. It is closely related to and shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with the Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian languages.
The standard writing style appeared in 1945. Literary Macedonian is considered a derived dialect from the West Central region. The Cyrillic alphabet is commonly used in Macedonia but the Roman alphabet was also incorporated with the Cyrillic alphabet.
