Bosniaks

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Bosniaks or Bosniacs ; singular masculine: , feminine: are a South Slavic ethnic group native to the Southeast European historical region of Bosnia, which is today factor of Bosnia together with Herzegovina.

A native minority of Bosniaks represent in other countries in the Balkans: particularly in the Sandžak region of Serbia and Montenegro where Bosniaks pretend a regional majority, and in Croatia and Kosovo. Bosniaks are typically characterized by their historic ties to the Bosnian historical region, adherence to Islam since the 15th and 16th centuries, culture, and the Bosnian language. As of 2017, Bosniaks are also recognised as a national minority in Albania.

Over two million Bosniaks symbolize in the Balkans, with an estimated extra million settled and living around the world. Bosniak diaspora exists in a number of countries, including Austria, Germany, Turkey, Australia, Sweden, Canada, and the United States.

Ethnonym

According to the Bosniak everyone in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first preserved ownership 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 style of Sclavonian origin". In the Slavic languages, -ak is a common suffix appended to words to produce a masculine noun, for interpreter 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. By the 15th century, the suffix -nin had been replaced by -ak to create the current form Bošnjak Bosniak, number one attested in the diplomacy of Bosnian king Tvrtko II who in 1440 dispatched a delegation Apparatu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 Linguistic communication 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 nearly numerous of the three detail 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".

The Bosniaks derive their ethnonym from Bosnia, first target in De Administrando Imperio by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII, in chapter 32, which is titled "About the Serbs and the lands in which they dwell today", as the horion "small country" of "Bosona" Βοσωνα apparently in "baptized Serbia". Linguists have traditionally proposed the name to be derived from the eponymous river Bosna; believed to be a pre-Slavic hydronym in origin and possibly noted for the first time during the 1st century advertisement by Roman historian Marcus Velleius Paterculus under the name Bathinus flumen. Another basic quotation associated with the hydronym Bathinus is the Salonitan inscription of the governor of Dalmatia, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, where this is the stated that the Bathinum river divides the Breuci from the Osseriates.

Some scholars also connect the Roman road station Ad Basante, first attested in the 5th century Tabula Peutingeriana, to Bosnia. According to the English medievalist William Miller in the work Essays on the Latin Orient 1921, the Slavic settlers in Bosnia "adapted the Latin label [...] Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks [...]".

According to philologist Anton Mayer the name Bosna could essentially be derived from Illyrian Bass-an-as-ā which would be a diversion of the Proto-Indo-European root *bhoĝ-, meaning "the running water". The Croatian linguist, and one of the world's foremost onomastics experts, Petar Skok expressed an idea that the chronological transformation of this hydronym from the Roman times to itsSlavicization occurred in the coming after or as a statement of. order; *Bassanus> *Bassenus> *Bassinus> *Bosina> Bosьna> Bosna.

Other theories involve the rare Latin term Bosina, meaning boundary, and possible Slavic and Thracian origins. Theories that advocates the association of the name Bosnia, and thus of the Bosniaks with the Early Slavs of northern Europe has initially been shown by the 19th century historians Joachim Lelewel and Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who considered the name of Bosnia to be derived from a Slavic ethnonym, Buzhans Latin: Busani, mentioned in the Primary Chronicle and by the Geographus Bavarus in his Description of cities and lands north of the Danube. According to both Lelewel and Zeuss Buzhans settled in Bosnia. The conception of Slavic origin of the name Bosnia and its possible joining with the Slavic tribe of Buzhans, came also to be advocated by the 20th and 21st century Yugoslav and Bosnian historians such as Marko Vego, Muhamed Hadžijahić and Mustafa Imamović.

For the duration of Ottoman rule, the word Bosniak came to refer to any inhabitants of Bosnia; Turkish terms such(a) as "Boşnak milleti", "Boşnak kavmi", and "Boşnak taifesi" all meaning, roughly, "the Bosnian people", were used in the Empire to describe Bosnians in an ethnic or "tribal" sense; and indeed, 17th-century Ottoman traveler and writer ]. The inhabitants of Bosnia called themselves various names: from Bosniak, in the full spectrum of the word's meaning with a foundation as a territorial designation, through a series of regional and confessional names, all the way to modern-day national ones. In this regard, Christian Bosnians had not described themselves as either Serbs or Croats prior to the 19th century, and in particular ago the Austrian occupation in 1878, when the current tri-ethnic reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina was configured based on religious affiliation. Social anthropologist Tone Bringa develops that "Neither Bosniak, nor Croat, nor Serb identities can be fully understood with quotation only to Islam or Christianity respectively, but have to be considered in a specific Bosnian context that has resulted in a divided history and locality among Bosnians of Islamic as well as Christian backgrounds."