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Bosniak

people
Also known as: Bosniac

Learn about this topic in these articles:

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnian War

  • Bosnian conflict: destruction in Sarajevo
    In Bosnian War

    … with a multiethnic population comprising Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Serbs, and Croats. After years of bitter fighting that involved the three Bosnian groups as well as the Yugoslav army, Western countries with backing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) imposed a final cease-fire negotiated at Dayton, Ohio, U.S., in 1995.

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history of Dayton Accords

Montenegro

  • Montenegro, map
    In Montenegro: Ethnic groups

    The largest non-Serb minorities are Bosniaks (Muslims) and Albanians, the former concentrated in the northern mountains and the latter along the Adriatic coast. Nearly three-fourths of the population of the coastal community of Ulcinj is Albanian.

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Serbia

  • Serbia
    In Serbia: Ethnic groups

    …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.

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Serbo-Croatian language

  • In Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian language

    Croats, Montenegrins, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). The term Serbo-Croatian was coined in 1824 by German dictionary maker and folklorist Jacob Grimm (see Brothers Grimm). In the 21st century, linguists and philologists adopted Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) as a more accurate and comprehensive label to describe the shared tongue.

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Srebrenica massacre

  • Srebrenica genocide
    In Srebrenica genocide

    …slaying of more than 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) boys and men, perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, in July 1995. In addition to the killings, more than 20,000 civilians were expelled from the area—a process known as ethnic cleansing. The massacre, which…

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Key People:
Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje

Bantu peoples, the approximately 85 million speakers of the more than 500 distinct languages of the Bantu subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family, occupying almost the entire southern projection of the African continent. The classification is primarily linguistic, for the cultural patterns of Bantu speakers are extremely diverse; the linguistic connection, however, has given rise to considerable speculation concerning a possible common area of origin of the Bantu peoples, the linguistic evidence pointing strongly to the region of the present-day Cameroon-Nigeria border. It is generally agreed that some one-third of the continent today occupied by Bantu-speaking peoples was, until approximately 2,000 years ago, the dominion of other groups. The causes and itinerary of the subsequent Bantu migration have attracted the attention of several anthropologists. George P. Murdock of the United States postulated that the expansion of the Bantu was associated with their acquisition of certain Malaysian food crops (banana, taro, and yam), which spread westward across the continent at about the time that the migration is thought to have begun. These crops, Murdock argued, enabled them to penetrate the tropical rainforest of equatorial Africa, whence they spread southward. A more widely held view, however, is that the migratory route lay eastward, across the southern Sudan, and then south, past the great lakes of the northeast.

Few generalities beyond this are useful. The economic, social, and political organizations of the various Bantu-speaking peoples are extremely diverse, partly reflecting the wide range of habitats they occupy. Descent and kinship systems, religious practices, and political organization also exhibit great diversity.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Elizabeth Prine Pauls.