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Most of the population of Serbia and neighbouring Montenegro is of South Slavic origin. Slavic tribes entered the region from the north during the 5th to 7th century ce, encountering Illyrian-speaking peoples. Although the Slavs acculturated large numbers of Illyrians, many of the latter retained their distinctive language and customs in the complex hills and valleys of present-day Albania.
Cleavages between southern Slav tribes developed over time, particularly after the establishment in the 4th century ce of the north-south “Theodosian Line” demarcating the eastern and western segments of the Roman Empire. Organization of the Christian church subsequently was based on this division. Missionaries from Rome converted Slavic tribes in the west to Roman Catholicism (these tribal groups becoming progenitors of the Slovenes and Croatians), while missionaries from Constantinople converted ancestors of Serbs and Montenegrins to Eastern Orthodoxy.
Ethnic groups
The early Serbian homeland was in the vicinity of Serbia’s Kopaonik Mountains, including the Kosovo Basin and the region around the ancient capital of Ras (near modern Novi Pazar). After Ottoman armies overran this region in the 14th century, many Serb families fled the southern basins and found shelter northward in the hills of Šumadija. Albanian tribal groups then moved into former Serbian settlements.
More than four-fifths of the population of Serbia identifies itself as Serb. The principal minorities are Hungarians and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). Roma (Gypsies) make up a small but distinctive group. Other minorities include Croats, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, and Romanians.
Excluding the Vojvodina, Serbs make up the vast majority of the inhabitants of Serbia proper. The proportion of Serbs there grew markedly during the 1990s, owing to an influx of Serbian refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Minority populations of Bosniaks, located in the southwest, and Albanians, scattered throughout Serbia proper, declined as many refugees fled to Bosnia and Kosovo.
In the Vojvodina, Serbs constitute slightly more than half of an exceptionally diverse population. Serbian refugees from the secessionist republics account for about one-eighth of the province’s total population. The second largest group is the Hungarians. At one time a large number of Germans lived in the Vojvodina, but the new communist government expelled virtually all German speakers in 1945. This group had descended from Austrian and German families brought to the Vojvodina by the Austrian empress Maria Theresa during the 18th century.
Before violence erupted in Kosovo in the late 1990s, Albanians constituted more than three-fourths of the province’s population, despite the fact that most Serbs traditionally considered Kosovo to be their cultural hearth. In the 1990s the regime of Slobodan Milošević engaged in a fierce struggle in Kosovo with Albanians who sought independence for the province after its autonomous status was revoked. Following clashes between Serbian police and military and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the Yugoslav government forced hundreds of thousands of Albanians to abandon their homes and flee to other countries, a process that came to be known as “ethnic cleansing.” In the wake of military intervention by NATO, many such refugees returned. After the peace agreement between NATO and Yugoslavia, some 200,000 Serbs and Roma fled Kosovo. When Kosovo declared independence in 2008, Albanians accounted for the overwhelming majority of its population.
Languages
Unlike Romanians or Hungarians, Serbs do not have a distinct language to set them apart from their neighbours. They speak essentially the same language as Croats, Bosniaks, and Montenegrins, although some pronunciation and vocabulary are distinctive. This language, linguistically termed Serbo-Croatian, is now identified as Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, or Montenegrin, depending on the ethnicity of the speaker. It is in its written form that Serbian differs from Bosnian and Croatian. Reflecting Serbian religious heritage, it uses a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet—a script originally developed by the Orthodox missionary brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius. Croatian is written in the Latin script of other Roman Catholic lands. At one time Bosnian used the Arabic alphabet, but it has also adopted the Latin alphabet. Serbian differs slightly from Montenegrin in the use of three letters, and Montenegrins use both the Cyrillic and the Latin. The Hungarian population’s Uralic language is unrelated to Serbian.
Religion
The distinguishing feature of Serbian national identity is its Eastern Orthodox Christian heritage, though probably less than one-tenth of the population actually attended church during the communist era. Throughout history the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church has viewed itself as the champion of Serbian national interests. During the Ottoman period it waged a long struggle against the influence of Greek clergy based in Constantinople. Because of its nationalist activities, the Ottoman regime suppressed the Serbian church from 1766 to 1832. Hungarians in the Vojvodina are divided between Roman Catholic and Calvinist Protestant groups.
Settlement patterns
Urban settlement
For many years a steady stream of migrants left marginal parts of Serbia to settle in Belgrade and other developed areas. According to the 1948 census, only one-fifth of Serbs were urban, but by the early 21st century more than half of Serbia’s population was city-dwelling. Nevertheless, truly urban settlements in Serbia are relatively few. Belgrade achieved a population in excess of one million by virtue of its role as capital both of Serbia and of Yugoslavia (and its successor, Serbia and Montenegro). Other urban areas are market towns and centres of regional administration.
Rural settlement
Significant differences exist between rural settlements in upland areas and those in Serbia’s basins and plains. Villages in the core region of Šumadija tend to be small, lying dispersed along roads that follow the crests of ridges. Houses are mainly constructed of logs or roughly sawn planks, with roofs of shingles; plaster frequently covers outer walls. Houses are usually spaced close together. In the plains of the Vojvodina, on the other hand, villages are large and widely spaced. They are much more recent than most highland settlements, since they appeared only during the 18th and 19th centuries, when Habsburg forces secured the Hungarian Plain. Most commonly they exhibit a gridiron form, reflecting sites originally laid out by Austrian military engineers.
Nucleated settlements of 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants are common in the Vojvodina. Although they are larger than other rural settlements, they lack the nonagricultural activities and amenities that would classify them as urban. Their large size is derived from the early concern that farm colonists needed protection against raids from the Ottoman-controlled south; it also facilitated control of the workforce by landowners who had gained extensive farming territories. Typically, houses in villages are elongated, with ends adjacent to the streets. Fences or walls, often with elaborate gates, join adjacent houses to mark courtyards and to afford privacy and protection.
As the threat of Ottoman border raids waned in the 19th and 20th centuries, individual farmsteads began to appear in open fields between large villages. Originally serving as shelters during harvest times, these salaj (Hungarian: tanyák) later became family homes. Such dispersed farmsteads now give parts of the Vojvodina an appearance similar to the American Midwest.
Demographic trends
The rate of population increase differs markedly by region. Between the 1971 and 1981 censuses, the total population of Serbia grew 10 percent. However, within the country, the Vojvodina had a net growth of only about 5 percent, while Kosovo, then a province of Serbia, expanded by more than 25 percent. In the 1980s the latter’s predominantly Albanian population had a birth rate double that of the rest of Serbia. Warfare in Kosovo dramatically altered population growth and settlement patterns in that region in the 1990s, with large numbers of Albanian refugees entering the province from other parts of Serbia. Today a life expectancy of about 70 years is characteristic of all parts of the country.