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.
Slavs settled the present-day territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 7th to 9th centuries amid the Migration Period. By the 12th century, they had formed an independent Bosnian state that would evolve into a kingdom by the late 14th century. Throughout the High Middle Ages, the Bosnian state was characterised by a disorganised Christian religious plurality, often accused of heresy due to a weak church organisation, brought about by rugged, mountainous terrain and poor communications with both Rome and Constantinople. Following the Ottoman conquest of the Kingdom of Bosnia in 1463, a distinct, native community of Bosnian Muslims began to form as the local Slavic population embraced Islam, mainly in the 16th century. 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 and early 18th century, Bosnia received a large influx of around 130,000 Muslim refugees from Ottoman territories lost in Hungary, Slavonia, Croatia and Dalmatia. These included both descendants of earlier migrants from Bosnia and local converts to Islam. Significant migrations of Slavic Muslims also occurred during the 19th century from present-day Serbia and Montenegro following the Serbian Revolution, when around 40,000 Slavic Muslims settled in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
During Ottoman rule, the social and cultural life of the population in Bosnia and Herzegovina was structured along religious lines, and the term Bosniak was primarily used as a territorial designation, with ethnic or national self-identification absent among the population, regardless of religious affiliation. With the collapse of Ottoman rule and the rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, a tri-ethnic reality was established in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as Bosnian Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians were gradually incorporated into the neighbouring 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 emigration 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.
Contemporary genetic studies have shown the three main ethnic groups of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats) to share, in spite of some lesser quantitative differences, a large fraction of the same ancient gene pool distinct for the region. Analyses have moreover revealed no significant difference between the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring populations.
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 (1682 or earlier), French Bosniaque (1695 or earlier) or German Bosniak (1737 or earlier). 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 (Polak) and Slovaks (Slovák). As such, "Bosniak" is etymologically equivalent to its non-ethnic counterpart "Bosnian" (which entered English around the same time via the Middle French, Bosnien): a native of Bosnia.
From the perspective of Bosniaks, bosanstvo (Bosnianhood) and bošnjaštvo (Bosniakhood) 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" (Latin: Bosniensis) which denoted the people of the medieval Bosnian Kingdom., p. 120; ..medieval Bosnia was a country of one people, of the single Bosnian people called the Bošnjani, who belonged to three confessions. By the 15th century, the suffix -(n)in had been replaced by -ak to create the current form Bošnjak (Bosniak), first attested in the diplomacy of Bosnian king Tvrtko II who in 1440 dispatched a delegation (Apparatu virisque insignis) to the Polish king of Hungary, Władysław Warneńczyk (1440–1444), asserting a common Slavic ancestry and language between the Bosniak and Pole.; Bošnjakom isti pradjedovi bili, koji i Poljakom (the ancestors of the Bosniak, same as those of the Pole)Muhamed Hadžijahić – Od tradicije do identiteta: geneza nacionalnog pitanja bosanskih Muslimana, 1974, p. 7; "Kralj Stjepan Tvrtković poslao je odmah ovome kralju "sjajno poslanstvo odličnih muževa", veli Vladislavov biograf pa nastavlja: "Ovi su, ispričavši porijeklo svoga plemena isticali, da su Bošnjacima bili isti pradjedovi kao i Poljacima te da im je zajednički jezik kojim govore i da se radi te srodnosti jezika i porijekla njihov kralj Tvrtko II živo raduje, što je Vladislav – kako se je pronio glas – sretan u svojim pothvatima" 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 (in Lat. Bosnensis), is originally a name defining the inhabitants of the medieval Bosnian state".Hrvatska enciklopedija (LZMK) – Bošnjaci
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 (1921), 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 (and neighboring regions) after the sixth century (amid the Migration Period), and were composed of small tribal units drawn from a single Slavic confederation known to the Byzantines as the Sclaveni (whilst the related Antes, roughly speaking, colonized the eastern portions of the Balkans).Hupchick, Dennis P. The Balkans from Constantinople to Communism, pp. 28–30. Palgrave Macmillan (2004)
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."T. E. Gregory, A History of Byzantium. Wiley- Blackwell, 2010. p. 169 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.The Beginning of the Middle Ages in the Balkans. Millenium, 2010. Florin Curta. "The archaeological evidence is incontrovertible: during the seventh century, the Balkans, especially the central and northern areas seem to have experienced something of a demographic collapse, with large tracts of land left without any inhabitants. The first open, rural settlements in the Balkans in more than 150 years appeared in the north, along the valley of the river Danube, and were most likely in the borderlands of the Avar qaganate and its sphere of influence."
In former Yugoslav historiography, a second migration of "Serb" and "Croat" tribes (variously placed in the 7th to 9th century) is viewed as that of elites imposing themselves on a more numerous and 'amorphous' Slavic populace,, pp. 404–406 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 (Sorabos) who were 'said to hold much of Dalmatia'.The Origin of the Royal Frankish Annal's Information about the Serbs in Dalmatia.Tibor Zivkovic. УДК: 94(=163.41)(497.13)"08"(093)
The earliest reference to Bosnia as such is the De Administrando Imperio, written by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (r. 913–959). At the end of chapter 32 ("Of the Serbs and of the country they now dwell in"), 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 (inhabited cities), the first being those "en tē baptismenē serbia" (in baptized Serbia; six listed), the second being "εἱς τὸ χορίον Βόσονα, τὸ Κάτερα καί τὸ Δεσνήκ / eis to chorion Bosona, to Katera kai to Desnēk" (in the territory of Bosona, [the cities of] Katera and Desnik).De administrando imperio. Constantine Porphyrogenitus. Washington, 1993; repr. of 1967 edition, Dumbarton Oaks Texts #1, pp. 160 & 161. Online at https://archive.org/details/porphyrogenitus-1967-dai/page/161/mode/2up
To Tibor Živković, this suggests that from a tenth-century Byzantine viewpoint, Bosnia was a territory within the principality of Serbia.On the Beginnings of Bosnia in the Middle Ages. Tibor Zivkovic. Spomenica akademika Marka Šunjića (1927–1998), Sarajevo 2010, 161–180 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 (county, regional) names, called themselves Bosnians.