Macedonian is a South Slavic language codified as a distinct standard language in 1944, when the People's Republic of Macedonia was established within Yugoslavia. It is closely related to Bulgarian and shares the distinction — rare among Slavic languages — of having almost entirely abandoned the noun case system, replacing it with a postpositional definite article. Macedonian uses the Cyrillic alphabet in a script reformed in the 1940s. The language has been a subject of political dispute with neighbouring Bulgaria, which historically regarded it as a dialect of Bulgarian, though Macedonian is recognised as a separate language by the vast majority of international linguists. North Macedonia is officially bilingual at the national level, with Albanian co-official where Albanian speakers exceed 20% of the local population.
