“THE SOUTH SLAVS WERE UNITED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE AND DIVIDED BY ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE” At the time of World War I the South Slavs were a people united by a common language and divided by almost everything else. Consisting broadly of four groups of Serbo-Croat speakers – Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Croats (Roman Catholics, using the Latin alphabet), Serbs and Montenegrins (both Eastern Orthodox, using the Cyrillic alphabet) – and three linguistic cousins; closely Slovenes, more distantly Macedonians and Bulgarians.
These populations (along with non-South Slavs, such as Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, Jews, Roma and Sinti, Albanians and Vlachs) could be found across the Balkans, regardless of national boundaries.Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bosniaks, Croats and Slovenes were generally perceived as loyal to the Habsburg crown, while Serbs were widely seen as…