Classification
The noting of Shopi as a "group" began in the 19th-century migrational waves of poor workers from the so-called Shopluk, poor areas (villages) beyond Sofia.
The Bulgarian scholars put Shopi as a subgroup of the Bulgarian ethnos. As with every ethnographic group, the Bulgarian Academy notes, the Shopi in Bulgaria consider themselves the true and most pure of the Bulgarians, the mountaineers around Turnovo claim their land as true Bulgarian from time immemorial, etc.
Yugoslav and modern Serbian scholars put the Šopi (also known as Šopovi) as a subgroup of the Serb ethnos, emphasizing on the group being closer to Serbs than Bulgarians culturally and linguistically, calling it a population in a foreign (Bulgarian) area, at the Serbo-Bulgarian border. The Šopi left of the Pčinja river down to the Vardar called their own language Serbian. Serbian ethnographer Jovan Cvijić, at the Peace Conference in Paris, presented a study in which he had divided the Shopluk into three groups, Serbs, mixed population, and a group closer to Bulgarians. He also emphasized on the Serb tradition of Slava being an important cultural marker.
According to A. Belitch and T. Georgevitch (1919), the Shopi, a mixed Serbo-Bulgar people in Western Bulgaria, were of Serb origin. This Serbian ethnographical group, according to them, inhabited a region east of the border as far as the line Bregovo-Kula-Belogradchik-Iskrets, thence towards Radomir and to the east of Kyustendil; to the east of that limit the Serb population, blended with the Bulgar element, reached the Iskar banks and the line which linked it to Ihtiman.
However, the prominent Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić wrote in a letter to the Bulgarian Nayden Gerov in 1859, that Pirot area is Bulgarian populated. Another Serbian author Milan Savic in his book "History of the Bulgarian people until the end of its state" issued in Novi Sad wrote, that at his time (1878) Nis and environs (i.e. including Pirot area) were Bulgarian poulated.
The French Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, when traveling across Bulgaria in 1841, describes the population of the Sanjak of Niš as Bulgarians. Felix Philipp Kanitz recalled that in 1872 (during the Ottoman rule), the inhabitants had a Bulgarian national conscience, and by the end of the 19th century (when the area was in Serbia), they were divided on the issue, many in the older generation had fondness of Bulgarians. Also, in the 19th century Shopiarea was one of the centres of Bulgarian National Revival. It was ceded to the Bulgarian Exarchate.
The Czech Jireček noted that the Shopi differed very much from the Bulgarians, in language and habits, and noted that the Bulgarians regarded them simple folk. He connected their name to the Thracian tribe of Sapsei.
The American Association for South Slavic Studies noted that the Shopi were recognized as a distinct sub-group in Bulgaria. A writer cited by the American Geographical Society (1918), says that the Shopi, particularly those of Tran, Bryeznik and Kula, as well as the population of central Macedonia, are doubtless more closely related to the Serbians than to the Bulgarians.
The rural inhabitants near Sofia were popularly claimed to be descendants of the Pechenegs.
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