Muslims (ethnic group)

Muslims (Serbo-Croatian Latin and Slovene: Muslimani, Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic and Macedonian: Муслимани) are an ethnoreligious group of Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims, inhabiting mostly the territory of the former Yugoslavia.

The term Muslims became widely used for the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims in the early 1900s. It gained official recognition in the 1910 census. The 1971 amendment to the Constitution of Yugoslavia also recognised them as a distinct nationality. It grouped several distinct South Slavic communities of Islamicethnocultural tradition. Before 1993, the vast majority of present-day Bosniaks self-identified as ethnic Muslims, along with smaller groups of other ethnicities, such as the Gorani and the Torbeši. This designation did not include non-Slavic Yugoslav Muslims, such as Albanians, Turks and some Romani people.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the majority of the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia adopted the Bosniak ethnic designation. They are today constitutionally recognised as one of three constituent nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Approximately 100,000 people across the rest of the former Yugoslavia consider themselves to be Slavic Muslims, mostly in Serbia. They are constitutionally recognized as a distinct ethnic minority in Montenegro.