Bulgarian is natively spoken by about 4.9 million people, primarily in Bulgaria, with smaller communities in Serbia, Greece, and among the Bulgarian diaspora. It is a central part of Bulgarian cultural identity, known for its rich folklore, traditional music, and the Cyrillic alphabet, which was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire. Bulgarian grammar features a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order and is unique among Slavic languages for its use of definite articles postfixed to nouns and the absence of noun cases.