Etymology and Definition
According to the Bosniac entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of Bosniak in English was in "1836 Penny Cyclopaedia V. 231/1 The inhabitants of Bosnia are composed of Bosniaks, and it arrived in English either via the French "Bosniaque", or the German "Bosniake", or the Russian "Bosnyak".
The earliest attestation to a Bosnian "name" is the historical term "Bošnjanin" (Latin: Bosniensis), which signified the inhabitants of the medieval Bosnian kingdom. By the early days of Ottoman rule, the word had been replaced by "Bosniak" (Bošnjak). The Bosniaks derive their ethnic name from Bosnia and the Bosna river, which has been proposed to have an Illyrian origin - Bosona.
For the duration of Ottoman rule, the word Bosniak came to refer to all inhabitants of Bosnia; Turkish terms such 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 Evliya Çelebi reports in his work Seyahatname of the people in Bosnia as natively known as Bosniaks (Bošnjaci). However, the concept of nationhood was foreign to the Ottomans at that time - not to mention the idea that Muslims and Christians of some military province could foster any common sur-confessional sense of identity. 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.
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