Bosniaks
The Bosniaks, are a South Slavic ethnic group and nation native to Bosnia and Herzegovina and constitute the largest ethnic group in Bosnia and Herzegovina, followed by Serbs and Croats. They share a common ancestry, culture, history and language emanating from the Bosnian historical region; and traditionally and predominantly adhere to Sunni Islam for which reason they are often also referred to as Bosnian Muslims although this is an imprecise ethnic descriptor today. The Bosniaks constitute significant native communities in Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Kosovo as well. Largely due to displacement stemming from the Bosnian War and Genocide in the 1990s, they also form a significant diaspora with several Bosniak communities across Europe, the Americas and Oceania.
A distinct native community of Bosnian Muslims began to form after the Islamisation of the Christian multi-confessional Slavic-speaking population in Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring regions at the end of the 15th and, mainly, in the 16th century, following the Ottoman conquest of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. During Ottoman rule, the social and cultural life of the population in Bosnia and Herzegovina was structured along religious lines, and the Bosniak name was applied to the population primarily as a territorial designation in a time when ethnic or national self-identification was absent among the population regardless of religion. Despite an initially steep increase upwards to three-fourths of the Bosnian population at its height, wars and plagues would later throughout Ottoman rule decimate the Bosnian Muslim population who, in contrast to their rural Christian counterparts, lived in more densely populated urban centres and were obligated to partake in Ottoman military campaigns. In the late 17th century, a large influx of Muslim immigrants from neighbouring western lands outside Bosnia and Herzegovina came to make up around half of the total Bosnian Muslim population. Significant migrations occurred during the 19th century as well, from present-day Serbia and Montenegro.
With the collapse of Ottoman rule and the rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, a tri-ethnic reality was installed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the Bosnian Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians gradually being incorporated into the neighboring Croat and Serb national identities. For the Bosnian Muslims, interposed between the stronger and rivalling Serb and Croat national movements, and weakened by large-scale emigrations to Ottoman Turkey and the loss of influence, the process of ethno-national self-determination would proceed well into the late 20th century when the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence and the Bosnian Muslims affirmed the Bosniak name for their nation. Today Bosniaks are recognized by the Dayton Agreement and the constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina as one of the three constitutive nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina alongside Serbs and Croats.
Etymology
According to the Bosniak entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first preserved use of "Bosniak" in English was by English diplomat and historian Paul Rycaut in 1680 as Bosnack, cognate with post-classical Latin Bosniacus, French Bosniaque or German Bosniak. The modern spelling is contained in the 1836 Penny Cyclopaedia V. 231/1: "The inhabitants of Bosnia are composed of Bosniaks, a race of Sclavonian origin". In the Slavic languages, -ak is a common suffix appended to words to create a masculine noun, for instance also found in the ethnonym of Poles and Slovaks. As such, "Bosniak" is etymologically equivalent to its non-ethnic counterpart "Bosnian" : a native of Bosnia.From the perspective of Bosniaks, bosanstvo and bošnjaštvo are closely and mutually interconnected, as Bosniaks connect their identity with Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The earliest attestation to a Bosnian ethnonym emerged with the historical term "Bošnjanin" which denoted the people of the medieval Bosnian Kingdom. By the 15th century, the suffix -in had been replaced by -ak to create the current form Bošnjak, first attested in the diplomacy of Bosnian king Tvrtko II who in 1440 dispatched a delegation to the Polish king of Hungary, Władysław Warneńczyk, asserting a common Slavic ancestry and language between the Bosniak and Pole. The Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute thus defines Bosniak as "the name for the subjects of the Bosnian rulers in the pre-Ottoman era, subjects of the Sultans during the Ottoman era, and the current name for the most numerous of the three constituent peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosniak, as well as the older term Bošnjanin, is originally a name defining the inhabitants of the medieval Bosnian state".
Linguists have most commonly proposed the toponym Bosnia to be derived from the eponymous river Bosna; widely believed to be a pre-Slavic hydronym in origin and possibly mentioned for the first time during the 1st century AD by Roman historian Marcus Velleius Paterculus as Bathinus flumen.
Linguist Petar Skok expressed an opinion that the chronological transformation of this hydronym from the Roman times to its final Slavicization occurred in the following order; *Bassanus> *Bassenus> *Bassinus> *Bosina> Bosьna> Bosna.
According to the English medievalist William Miller in the work Essays on the Latin Orient, the Slavic settlers in Bosnia "adapted the Latin designation Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks ".
History
Origins
The Early Slavs, a people from northeastern Europe, settled the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina after the sixth century, and were composed of small tribal units drawn from a single Slavic confederation known to the Byzantines as the Sclaveni.Recent Anglophone scholarship has tended to downplay the role of migrations. For example, Timothy Gregory conjectures that "It is now generally agreed that the people who lived in the Balkans after the Slavic "invasions" were probably, for the most part, the same as those who had lived there earlier, although the creation of new political groups and the arrival of small numbers of immigrants caused people to look at themselves as distinct from their neighbours, including the Byzantines." However, the archaeological evidence paints a picture of widespread depopulation, perhaps a tactical re-settlement of Byzantine populations from provincial hinterlands to Coastal towns after 620 CE.
In former Yugoslav historiography, a second migration of "Serb" and "Croat" tribes is viewed as that of elites imposing themselves on a more numerous and 'amorphous' Slavic populace, however such a paradigm needs to be clarified empirically.
Eighth-century sources mention early Slavophone polities, such as the Guduscani in northern Dalmatia, the principality of Slavs in Lower Pannonia, and that of Serbs who were 'said to hold much of Dalmatia'.
The earliest reference to Bosnia as such is the De Administrando Imperio, written by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus. At the end of chapter 32, after a detailed political history, Porphyrogenitus asserts that the prince of Serbia has always submitted himself to Rome, in preference to Rome's regional rivals, the Bulgarians. He then gives two lists of kastra oikoumena, the first being those "en tē baptismenē serbia", the second being "εἱς τὸ χορίον Βόσονα, τὸ Κάτερα καί τὸ Δεσνήκ / eis to chorion Bosona, to Katera kai to Desnēk".
To Tibor Zivkovic, this suggests that from a tenth-century Byzantine viewpoint, Bosnia was a territory within the principality of Serbia. The implicit distinction made by Porphyrogenitus between "baptised Serbia" and the territory of Bosona is noteworthy.
Subsequently, Bosnia might have been nominally vassal to various rulers from Croatia and Duklja, but by the end of the twelfth century, it came to form an independent unit under an autonomous ruler, Ban Kulin, who called himself Bosnian.
In the 14th century, a Bosnian kingdom centred on the river Bosna emerged. Its people, when not using local names, called themselves Bosnians.
Following the conquest of Bosnia by the Ottoman Empire in the mid-15th century, there was a rapid and extensive wave of conversion from Christianity to Islam, and by the early 1600s roughly two-thirds of Bosnians were Muslim. In addition, a smaller number of converts from outside Bosnia were in time assimilated into the common Bosniak unit. These included Croats, Serbian and Montenegrin Muhacirs, and slavicized Vlachs, Albanians and German Saxons.
Bosniaks are generally defined as the South Slavic nation on the territory of the former Yugoslavia whose members identify themselves with Bosnia and Herzegovina as their ethnic state and are part of such a common nation, and of whom a majority are Muslim by religion. Nevertheless, leaders and intellectuals of the Bosniak community may have various perceptions of what it means to be Bosniak. Some may point to an Islamic heritage, while others stress the purely secular and national character of the Bosniak identity and its connection with Bosnian territory and history.
For the duration of Ottoman rule, the multiconfessional community of Bosnia was delineated primarily by faith rather than ethnic or national conceptualisation, and "Bosniak" came to refer to all inhabitants of Bosnia as a territorial designation. When Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, national identification in the modern sense had been a largely foreign concept to Bosnians of both the Christian and Muslim faiths, substantially lagging behind the Romantic nationalism of Europe at the time. In this regard, Christian Bosnians had not described themselves as either Serbs or Croats before the 19th century, particularly before the Austrian occupation, when the current tri-ethnic reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina was configured based on religious affiliation. For the Muslim Bosnians, this process was further delayed not least by the wish to retain local privileges bestowed upon them by the social structure of Ottoman Bosnia.