Ethnicity and mother tongue in population censuses: from Yugoslavia to Serbia and Montenegro

ABSTRACT

Taking the former Yugoslavia and some of its successor states as a case study, this article examines the concepts of ethnicity and mother tongue (with a side glance at religion) as employed in recent population censuses. A special focus is on the sometimes considerable discrepancies between the ethnic and linguistic affiliations of the respondents, a phenomenon commonly disregarded but potentially opening the door to manipulation of census returns in the service of particular interests. It is shown that, while having separate rubrics for the two features is in itself a useful methodological tool, their mutual relationship should be carefully investigated rather than simply taken for granted.

KEYWORDS:

• Population censuses
• ethnicity
• mother tongue
• religion
• alterophony
• Yugoslavia
• Serbia
• Montenegro

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For an early international collection of papers discussing the conceptual, developmental, educational and political aspects of the notion, see Denison (1986).

2 Interestingly, however, some of the early Serbian censuses taken between 1834 and 1910 registered as separate groups bilinguals speaking Serbian and Romanian/Vlach (but not the likewise bilingual ‘Gypsies’ or Jews). Another curiosity is the unique occurrence in the 1900 census of the term ‘language in use’ instead of ‘mother tongue’, though with the same meaning (Pavlović and Prelić 2015, esp. 161). In our own days, Slovenia’s censuses of 1991 and 2002 (the last to date) contain – in addition to ‘mother tongue’ but not as a replacement for it – the option ‘conversational language’, that is, one used in some ethnically mixed homes (see Šircelj 2003, 103–113).

3 The statistical data and relations provided in the foregoing passages have been cited or calculated from the official publication Popis stanovništva SFRJ 1981 and from Bugarski (1992).

4 For the background and details of these developments, see Bugarski (2012), with references.

5 In the ‘ethnic’ sense, a previously far more popular declaration, chosen mainly by offspring of ethnically mixed marriages or by those explicitly favouring nationality over ethnicity, for emotional or ideological reasons.

6 The cited data and relations have been drawn from Popis stanovnišva, domaćinstava i stanova u 2002 and the Documentary table 062, which enables an insight into crossed data on ethnic affiliation and mother tongue.

7 This caveat is due to an anonymous reviewer, whose comments are gratefully acknowledged.

8 The statistical data are taken from Jančić (2013); cf. also the tables and comments in Đurić et al. (2014).

9 For more details on ethnophony/alterophony, with a tabular overview, see Đurić et al. (2014, 159–162).

10 Zavod za statistiku Crne Gore – Monstat/Statistical Office of Montenegro/; also Table CG4.