AHC: United Serbo-Croatian Culture
- Thread starter Tripledot
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Leaving aside your highly controversial "same language" claim, there never was a unified culture between Croats and Serbs, so first it needs to form before it could be kept. The two peoples have more than a millenia of history dividing them, and no significant interaction an the scale necessary for a unified culture between the two happened before the 19th century.
I guess this would eventually happen with a continued Yugoslavia. The fact is, people are still going to see themselves as Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, etc. but there was a unified 'Yugoslav' identity adhered to by many (although not the majority) of people there. Simply make it more common, which will happen over time.
Part of the problem is that the cultural focus of each was divided between the Roman East and West which is most easily noticed in the Catholic/Orthodox division.
You'll need some way to have these the same for long enough that they see each other as mere locational variants of the same group.
You'll need some way to have these the same for long enough that they see each other as mere locational variants of the same group.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Serbian and Croatian are very similar because of linguistic convergence, not because they always were or something.
The Chakavian dialect of Croatian sounds extremely confounding to the average Serb. This was also the "dominant" Croatian literary dialect until more modern times, when Croatian was standardized after the speech of the Shtokavian Croats, who lived near Serbs and spoke the closest dialect to Serbian of all the Croats. There was a similar, though less drastic, development in Serbian. 99% of Serbian dialects are Shtokavian-type anyway, but it was standardized after the speech of Eastern Herzegovian Serbs - again, the dialect spoken by Serbs who lived near Croats.
It would be interesting to see just what kind of an effect could Illyrianism achieve if it was implemented from its creation - let's say if Spain, or another power, wrests control of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia from the Ottomans in 1600 and creates a unified protectorate of Illyria (Yugoslavia 300 years before its time). With 300 extra years of peace and living in the same state, Serbs and Croats might shuffle towards a more common identity, although regional sub-identities would still exist.
Then again, we can't be sure anything short of a tactical nuke (moving the borders of the Catholic-Orthodox schism) would really work.
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Your best bet is likely to have similar religious and political domination. For instance, if both peoples use old Church Slavonic as their liturgical language and are both in the same kingdom, that will help to at least slow down the linguistic changes a bit. I'm not sure if it can stop them.
I don't know about Bosnia specifically, but in Serbia, Muslim Serbs were called Turks.
The same could be said of English until well into the 18th century, and French into the 19th.
The northern dialects of English might as well have been another language to people of southern England for many centuries - people needed translators from the Midlands if they wanted to speak with each other, mostly for trading purposes.
Arguably, Samuel Johnson's dictionary was instrumental for the standardisation of English. If he picked a different one, or if the dictionary writer was from a different part of England, the language might be very different by the present day.
Depends on the individual. Some considered themselves Serbs, others Croats, but most identified as the Bosnian Muslim community first, and as Croats/Serbs second or not at all.
Others considered them 100% Croats, 100% Serbs or 100% Turks, depending on what political statement was being made.
That was before the 1860s. After that they were considered to be Muslim Serbs by the state (again, some of them really identified as such, some didn't).
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Possible if the Great Schism is averted, or something makes Serbs and Croats have the same religion. This requires a POD very far back, meaning the animosity between the ethnicities won't be created(it started in the 1900-s. At a push, 1844.(the Nachertaniye document)).
Linguistically, the Shtokavian dialect is indeed the closest meeting point, after the reforms of V. Karadžić. Before that, AFAIK, Serbian was extremely similar to Old Church Slavonic and by extension- Russian. Still, even now the lexical component is different than in Croatian. Common foods(carrot, tomato, eggplant, rice...) have different names in Serbian and Croatian. There are false friends, as well.
Linguistically, the Shtokavian dialect is indeed the closest meeting point, after the reforms of V. Karadžić. Before that, AFAIK, Serbian was extremely similar to Old Church Slavonic and by extension- Russian. Still, even now the lexical component is different than in Croatian. Common foods(carrot, tomato, eggplant, rice...) have different names in Serbian and Croatian. There are false friends, as well.
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They called themselves simply "muslims" or Bosnians. I would also like to point out that the demonym Muslimwith the capital M is archaic and outdated, same as "Negro" is in the United States.
That's because that is what Serbs called them. They never called themselves that. The muslims in Serbia called themselves muslims, simply because they were largely ethnic Serbs who converted to Islam. Calling them "Turks" was just another way to make them into an "other" and justify later pogroms and massacres against them. There is even that old bogus story that the Turks brought the muslims from Anatolia on donkeys, again denying any possibility that their own people could possibly convert to a heathen faith.
True, except nobody ever self-identified as a Turk, this was always featured as an appendage coming from outside sources (non-muslims) who considered all Balkan muslims "Turks" or holding to the "Turkish faith", that is Islam. There is even use of Mohammedan or Mohametan.
In Bosnia at least, before the national awakenings after the 1840s, few people identified themselves as Serbs or Croats, rather preferring to primarily state their religious identity, i.e. catholic or orthodox, to distinguish themselves from their muslim neighbors.
I certainly didn't mean they called themselves that, I was just reading the question as "what did other communities in Bosnia consider the Bosnian Muslims to be." At the same time, I would not say "nobody ever self-identified as a Turk." There were some peoples in the Ottoman Empire that both Turkified and Islamified, unlike the Albanians or Bosnians.
Not really, it was simply a consequence of the Ottoman religion-based legal system which grouped all members of a single religious body together with the same group of rights and obligations, leading to outside identification with the culturally dominant one. As for the thesis that no Slavic-originating Muslims ever assimilated to a Turkish identity, that sounds pretty weird when we know there are millions of Turks originating from Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and so on in modern day Turkey.
Presumably any actual Turkish officials or settlers around identified as Turks, too.
That's highly debatable, even in central Bosnia there were known cases of people declaring as Serbs or Croats well before 1840. Again, not much of a need to distinguish themselves from Muslims when the legal system already does it on its own.
Though I'm not sure how any of this relates to the topic. Bosnia could have acted as a bridge of cultural convergence between Serbs and Croats before 1463, not much later than that.
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This is perhaps not related to this topic, but even today many Pomaks (like the Bosniaks Slavic speaking Muslims) in Bulgaria call themselves Turks, even if they don't speak Turkish and despite there being an actual Turkish minority in Bulgaria. So it certainly seems possible that this would happen in Bosnia or Serbia.
Isn't the Bozniak identity old too? They where followers of an 'heretical' or at least odd church before the Ottoman came, and took Islam...
And isn't the dialects differences of Serbo-croatian exagerated in range and age by nationalism? we saw what it gave.
In Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian Muslim is not capitalized, except in the case when it is to denote a nationality, Muslim by nationality. Today there are very few people who identify as Muslims by nationality in the Balkans, mostly as holdovers from the communist era.
Actually "Turk" was used sparingly and usually as a derogatory term, until Ataturk when the Turkish national consciousness formed. Most people referred to themselves by their religious domination precisely because they were ALL "Osmanli", or Ottoman subjects. Exceptions exist of course, especially in countries where there was already a strong national identity or which had been conquere relatively late or had semi-independence from the Porte (Serbia, Wallachia, etc.) This is all because of the unique Millet system in the Ottoman empire, which did not recognize ethnicity, but distinguished solely by religious affiliation.
You are also somehow conflating what I said, that Muslims who lived in Bosnia or Serbia didn't call themselves Turks (which is what I assumed was being said) with Balkan Muslims moving to areas where Turks (in the modern sense) were the majority and assimilating into those communities. Nowhere did I say this was not true. Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Slavic Balkan Muslims fled for Istanbul and the Anatolian coast with the retreat of the Ottoman Empire. There is a pretty telling trail of shipwrecked refugee settlements in Albania too. What I actually said is that these people had no legitimate reason to call themselves Turks, because Turkish nationality in the modern sense didn't exist. There was no point. They were Muslims according to the Millet system. They were Ottoman subjects according to law. That was all that mattered. The Ottoman Empire was a multicultural state based on religious groups.
Yes? I don't understand what you're getting at. There was no "Turkish" as you use it today, to signify Turkish nationality. This is an anachronism. This "Turkish official" could be from anywhere in the Ottoman Empire, from Skoplje to Alexandria. Turk was even used as a derogatory term, i.e. calling someone a "Turk from Anatolia" basically meant uneducated country bumpkin.
Really? Do you happen to have any sources? I'm genuinely curious.
Though I'm not sure how any of this relates to the topic. Bosnia could have acted as a bridge of cultural convergence between Serbs and Croats before 1463, not much later than that.[/QUOTE]
I wasn't even getting at that, I was merely replying to another poster's inquiry as to the demonym used to label Muslims in the Balkans. I think you may have misread or misinterpreted what I wrote.
Not exactly. In many examples of Muslim/Bosniak Arebica poetry, the word Turk is used without derogatory connotations, as a synonym for Muslim, or, less commonly, as a synonym for an ideal, pious Muslim figure. Occasionally even the phrase "...we Turks..." pops up, even though we know the authors are Slavic.
Which indicates that 'Turk' rarely had a derogatory meaning among Muslims, and that using Turk as a synonym for a member of the Muslim millet was neither invented nor exclusively used by Christians.
I read some time ago about some 18th century letters from the Orthodox in Sarajevo in which they referred to themselves as Serbs, but I'll have to try and find exactly where I read it again.
It wasn't directed at you, I was just unsure how Socrates' question relates to the AHC.