Muslims by ethnicity
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| c. 100,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Kosovo
|
27,553 (2011) |
 Serbia
|
22,301 (2011) |
 Montenegro
|
20,537 (2011) |
 Bosnia and Herzegovina
|
12,101 (2013) |
 Slovenia
|
10,467 (2002) |
 Croatia
|
7,558 (2011) |
 Macedonia
|
2,553 (2002) |
| Languages | |
| Serbo-Croatian, other South Slavic languages | |
| Religion | |
| Islam | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Bosniaks, Gorani, Macedonian Muslims, Pomaks, Torbeš | |
Muslims (Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene: Muslimani, Муслимани) was a term used in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as an official supra-ethnic designation of nationality of Slavic Muslims and thus encompassed a number of ethnically distinct populations, most numerous being the Bosniaks of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sandžak, along with smaller groups of Gorani, Macedonian Muslims and Pomaks of Macedonia and Kosovo. Notably, "Muslims" were one of the constitutive nations of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sandžak mostly adopted the "Bosniak" ethnic designation in connection to their national awakening on the eve of the Breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and they are today constitutionally recognized as such. Approximately 100,000 people across the former Yugoslavia still consider themselves to be Muslims in a national sense.
Up until the 19th century, the word Bosniak (Bošnjak) came to refer to all inhabitants of Bosnia regardless of religious affiliation; terms such as "Boşnak milleti", "Boşnak kavmi", and "Boşnak taifesi" (all meaning, roughly, "the Bosnian people"), were used in the Ottoman Empire to describe Bosnians in an ethnic or "tribal" sense. After the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, the Austrian administration officially endorsed Bošnjaštvo ('Bosniakhood') as the basis of a multi-confessional Bosnian nation. The policy aspired to isolate Bosnia and Herzegovina from its irredentist neighbors (Orthodox Serbia, Catholic Croatia, and the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire) and to negate the concept of Croatian and Serbian nationhood which had already begun to take ground among Bosnia and Herzegovina's Catholic and Orthodox communities, respectively. Nevertheless, in part due to the dominant standing held in the previous centuries by the native Muslim population in Ottoman Bosnia, a sense of Bosnian nationhood was cherished mainly by Muslim Bosnians, while fiercely opposed by nationalists from Serbia and Croatia who were instead opting to claim the Bosnian Muslim population as their own, a move that was rejected by most of them. After World War I, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later "Kingdom of Yugoslavia") was formed and it recognized only those three nationalities in its constitution.
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