nearly all nouns now in the surviving nominative case. This is partly true of the Torlakian dialect. In the northwest, the instrumental case merges with the accusative case, and the locative and genitive cases merge with the nominative case. Further south, all inflections disappear and syntactic meaning is determined solely by prepositions. Lack of phoneme /x/ Macedonian, Torlakian and a number of Serbian and Bulgarian dialects, unlike all other Slavic languages, technically have no phoneme like , or . In other Slavic languages, or (the latter from Proto-Slavic *g in "H-Slavic languages") is common. The appearance of the letter h in the alphabet is reserved mostly for loanwords and toponyms within the Republic of North Macedonia but outside of the standard language region. In Macedonian, this is the case with eastern towns such as Pehčevo. In fact, the Macedonian language is based in Prilep, Pelagonia and words such as thousand and urgent are iljada and itno in standard Macedonian but hiljada and hitno in Serbian (also, Macedonian oro, ubav vs. Bulgarian horo, hubav (folk dance, beautiful)). This is actually a part of an isogloss, a dividing line separating Prilep from Pehčevo in the Republic of North Macedonia at the southern extreme, and reaching central Serbia (Šumadija) at a northern extreme. In Šumadija, local folk songs may still use the traditional form of I want being oću (оћу) compared with hoću (хоћу) as spoken in Standard Serbian. Syllabic /l/ Some versions of Torlakian have retained the syllabic , which, like , can serve the nucleus of a syllable. In most of the Shtokavian dialects, the syllabic eventually became or . In standard Bulgarian, it is preceded by the vowel represented by ъ () to separate consonant clusters. Naturally, the becomes velarized in most such positions, giving . In some dialects, most notably the Leskovac dialect, the word-final -l has instead shifted into the vocal cluster -(i)ja; for example the word пекал became пекја (to bake). Word-medially however the syllabic /l/ remains unaltered. Features shared with Eastern South Slavic Loss of grammatical case as in Bulgarian and Macedonian Loss of infinitive as in Bulgarian and Macedonian, present in Serbian Full retention of the aorist and the imperfect, as in Bulgarian Use of a definite article as in Bulgarian and Macedonian, lacking in Serbian ə for Old Church Slavonic ь and ъ in all positions: sən, dən (Bulgarian sən, den; Serbian san, dan;