Bulgarian, the official language of Bulgaria, is spoken by more than 9.2 million people around the world. Together with Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Slovenian, Bulgarian is a member of the South Slavic language group. Dating from the 16th century, Bulgarian has borrowed many words from the Turkish and Greek languages and more recently from French, German and Russian. Bulgarian has no definite rules for stress so the accent of each word needs to be learned individually. Bulgarian also stands out by having a definite article unlike most other Slavic tongues. Bosnian uses the position and choice of prepositions (as seen in the English language) to indicate relationships within the grammatical structure rather than cases (as seen in Russian). Still, Bulgarian is closely related to other Slavic languages, particularly with respect to its grammar. The Cyrillic alphabet, in a modified form, is used to write Bulgarian.