Serbo-Croatians

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At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the term Serbo- Croat was used as a common term for Serbs and Croats (including the Bosniaks and the Montenegrins ). It was based on the theory that the existence of a common Serbo-Croatian language necessarily implies the existence of a common people. This theory had spread, among other things, as a result of the efforts of Illyrism to unite the South Slav peoples.

The term Serbo-Croat was also used in statistics at that time. In the nationality statistics of the Austrian half of the Habsburg dual monarchy Austria-Hungary , all residents with Serbo-Croatian mother tongue were classified as Serbo-Croatians . In the Hungarian half of the empire , which included Croatia , Serbs and Croats were officially listed separately from one another.

The Yugoslav state, founded in 1918, classified its South Slavic residents as Serbo-Croat or Slovenian, depending on their native language .

In the second Yugoslavia after 1945, Serbs and Croats were listed as separate ethnic groups, and the Montenegrins and Bosniaks (under the name Muslims ) were later recognized as separate ethnic groups. The only thing that remained of the term Serbo-Croatian was the adherence to the most uniform language standard possible for the Serbo-Croatian language with different dialects.