Bosnian Muslims

Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks are Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia, a region in the west of the Balkan Peninsula. Bosnian Muslims are Slavs who were - willingly or by force - converted to Islam during the Ottoman period.

They speak a variant of the common Serbo-Croatian language, written in the same form of the Latin alphabet which is also used in the Croat (or Western) variant of the Serbo-Croatian language. The main difference of the Bosnian language variant is that it contains many borrowings from Turkish - many of them being Arabic and Persian in origin - due to the Islamic faith of Bosniaks.

Bosnia forms now part of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a former Yugoslav Republic, having gained its independence in 1995 after a long civil war.