Ethnic Groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Ethnic Groups In Bosnia And Herzegovina

More than 95% of population of Bosnia and Herzegovina belongs to one of its three constituent nations: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats . The term constituent refers to the fact that these three ethnic groups are explicitly mentioned in the constitution, and that none of them can be considered a minority or immigrant.

While each have their own standard language variant and a name for it, they speak mutually intelligible languages. On a dialectal level, Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks speak a variety of Štokavian dialects: Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats "southern" neo-Štokavian; Croats and Bosniaks "western" neo-Štokavian and Bosniaks and Croats "eastern-Bosnian" old-Štokavian. These dialects are mutually intelligible, but have fixed phonetic, morphological and lexical differences. The question of standard language of Bosnia and Herzegovina is resolved in such a way that three constituent ethnic groups have their educational and cultural institutions in their respective native or mother tongue languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian.

The most easily recognizable feature that distinguishes the three ethnic groups is their religion, with Bosniaks predominantly Muslim, Serbs predominantly Orthodox Christians, and Croats Catholic Christians.

This has led historians, culturologists and ethnologists to believe that the ethnic groups of Bosnia and Herzegovina have emerged from a common Bosnian substratum fractured along religious lines in a process occurring with the rise of neighboring Serbian and Croatian nationalism during the 19th century, while the Bosniaks, being Muslim, were never successfully incorporated into either Serbian or Croatian national consciousness and would continue identifying primarily with Bosnia. Still others consider the Croats and Serbs to have merely completed their ethnic integration across borders in this period. A Y chromosome haplogroups study published in 2005 found that "three main groups of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in spite of some quantitative differences, share a large fraction of the same ancient gene pool distinctive for the Balkan area".