Slovenian, also known as Slovene, is today the offical language of the Republic of Slovenia. The Slovenian language boasts some 2 million speakers living primarily in Slovenia. Slovenian is a Slavic languages belonging to the South Slavic group which also includes Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Old Church Slavonic. Slovenian has an extremely complex grammatical structure and a relatively large number of recognized dialects which, when contrasted to its smallish number of speakers, indicates a high amount of variation within the language. After WWII, Slovenia was absorbed by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Slovenian became one of its official languages. After Slovenia gained independence in 1991, Slovenian was made Slovenia's official language. It is has since become one of the official languages of the European Union.