Serbia in figures
Serbia's population of 6.9 million (excluding the 2 million in Kosovo) has been in free fall for two decades as a result of civil wars and economic turmoil. In general, this trend continues as the population ages and nationals migrate to greener pastures. The labor force will number 3.16 million in 2020, 800,000 fewer than the previous year. Thanks to a compulsory school program, Serbia is on par with Western Europe. At 98 per cent, the country's literacy rate is high and nearly 70 per cent of the population has gone on to higher education. In this traditionally very rural nation, the majority now lives in cities (at 56.7%), however, the housing density is rather low, at 90.23 inhabitants/km², indicating that the countryside is very isolated and wild. Finally, all these people are grouped into distinct communities and the country recognizes twenty-six national minorities on its territory. The Serbian group alone constitutes 83.32% of the population.
A mosaic of peoples
The political model in Serbia (and throughout the Balkans) is based on strong communal identities. While Western European nation-states emphasize the concept of citizenship assimilating their minorities, this principle has never really worked in the multi-ethnic entities that dominated the Balkans (from the Ottoman enemy to the Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav model). Thus, ethnicity is of utmost importance in territorial divisions. As recently as 2006, the Serbian constitution states that Serbia is the country of the Serbs and then of all those who live there.
The Serbs are part of the family of South Slavs, who arrived from the border between Poland and present-day Germany and settled in the Balkans (specifically first in Kosovo) in the sixth century.
Today, minorities are represented at all political levels and legal tools guarantee their rights. The Hungarians of Vojvodina are an example. In the towns and villages where they form the majority, they learn Hungarian at school, in the administrations and jurisdictions, all documents are also in Hungarian, in the provincial parliament of Novi Sad, the deputies participate in the debates in their regional language and the exchanges are relayed by Hungarian media, etc. However, these mechanisms hardly apply to other, less numerous and less influential communities, which continues to create tensions. For example, the Bosnians of Sandžak are demanding recognition of the Bosnian language.Who are the Slavs?
The Serbs belong to the large family of Slavic peoples, which extends from Poland in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the far east of Siberia. The Slavs thus constitute the largest ethno-linguistic community in Europe (i.e., peoples who share the same linguistic roots) and the largest population of Indo-European origin on the continent, between 300 and 350 million people. Slavs have a common history and often consider themselves as cousins or even brothers, but rather within distinct groups. The Western Slavs, mainly Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Eastern Slavs, Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Southern Slavs, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Macedonians ... In total, the Slavs constitute thirteen nation-states and form minority communities in half a dozen other adjacent countries.
In this Slavic genealogy, the Serbs have a somewhat special place. They come from White Serbia, today's Lusatia inhabited by the Sorbs, on the German and Polish borders. White Serbia meaning "Serbia of the West", there would have been a second original Serbia, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Today's Serbia is therefore the third of the name. In this constellation of Slavic identities, the overwhelming figure is that of Russia, which considers itself the natural protector (and also occasionally the only legitimate state) of all Slavs. This historical and political viewpoint has led to many crises, including the assassination of the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe in 1945. This explains why Slavs are often not well received when they express their patriotic pride (which they do quite willingly).
There is little reason to want to unite these very different Slavic peoples. Originally an Indo-European confederation from the Ukrainian plains (and even then, there are few traces of it), they quickly divided into separate tribes with their own customs, religions, alphabets, while their languages quickly diverged under the influence of their neighbors. Thus, for example, the Poles are Catholic Slavs with a Latin alphabet and a Latinized Slavic, while the Russians, Orthodox Slavs, write in Cyrillic and borrow from Greek and Asian languages.
Serbs in the world
Serbia's borders have changed many times during its tumultuous history. This is true for the entire Balkans. No country in the region is ethnically "pure" and geographic boundaries do not necessarily follow population boundaries. In the Serbian case, it is estimated that the "Serbs of the region", living in the neighbouring states, account for 2 million people, or nearly a third of the population living in Serbia! Of these 2 million ethnic Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, just under 100,000 were displaced by the war and took refuge in Serbia. They are colloquially called "refugees" or izbleglica. But what really concerns governments is the rest of the Serbian diaspora, whose nationals have left their homeland literally in the millions over the past few decades. The country even has a state secretariat for the diaspora under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the current secretary is Frenchman Arnaud Gouillon, known for his membership in far-right groups in France). The diaspora contributes considerable sums to the national economy through the family and commercial ties that are maintained with their country of origin. It is estimated that the 4 million Serbs in the diaspora injected nearly $2.5 billion into the economy in 2005 (at the time, 10% of GDP). Of these 4 million Serbian exiles, about 1 million are in the United States, 500,000 in Germany, 300,000 in Austria, 250,000 in Canada and 120,000 in France. In all, if we add the Serbs living in the rest of the Balkans and the Serbs in the diaspora, we arrive at a result of more than 6 million individuals. This is the equivalent of the population of Serbia living outside its borders. Serbia is therefore a nation of uprooted people, like Lebanon or Armenia.
Immigration to Serbia
With all that has been said before, it is surprising to learn that Serbia is also, despite itself, a major host country for migrants.
Approximately 500,000 migrants live in the country, or about 5% of the population, mainly from the former Yugoslavia, fleeing violence or looking for better economic opportunities.
Serbia's geographical position at the crossroads of the Balkans also places it at the center of the notorious Balkan route, one of the main entry points for migrants en route from the Mediterranean to the European Union. During 2015, at the height of the migration crisis, nearly 650,000 migrants and refugees passed through Serbia. These flows are far too large to handle for a country the size of Serbia, even if the political will was there. But migrants are not welcome in the country. While the region is still recovering from the conflicts of the last generation, and the 100,000 Serbian refugees and 200,000 internally displaced persons are still living in "temporary" communal residences, there is no integration or reception policy for migrants. Of course, the migrants themselves are not very interested in settling in Serbia and are just passing through (even though asylum applications have increased tenfold from the years 2012-2013): their goal is Germany. However, Serbia, an official EU candidate since 2012, willingly cooperates (at least on paper) with European asylum policy. The country has become a "buffer zone" like Turkey, where migrants turned away by European border guards or detained by Serbian authorities live in miserable conditions in veritable "jungles" of tents without running water, electricity and often without food.
Serbian language
The spoken language belongs to the southern branch of the Slavic languages. It is derived from Church Slavonic, a literary language spoken by Serbs and Croats for a long time and codified in the 11th century. This old Slavonic, accessible to a minority of literates, was reformed in the 19th century by Vuk Karadžić. This grammarian from central Choumadie simplified the language according to the principle "write as you speak": the consequence is that Serbian spelling is clear because it follows the exact phonetics of the words. Everything that is pronounced is written and everything that is written must be pronounced. There are no exceptions to this rule. This reform facilitated, at the time when the Serbian state was being formed, the popularization of Serbian culture and the spread of political ideas, both in Serbia and in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, which still had large Serbian minorities on the eve of the First World War.
The other particularity of this language is its great lexical and syntactic richness, due to its use in regions with different cultures.
Indeed, the Serbs of Bosnia and Montenegro speak Jekavian, while in Serbia one speaks Ekavian. The difference is the almost systematic addition of the letter "J" in most words for Jekavian. In addition to this difference, the Serbian language contains words of Turkish origin, which it has assimilated over the centuries. This is what distinguishes it from Croatian, which is otherwise almost identical. In the days of Yugoslavia, the language was called Serbo-Croatian, a name obviously completely forgotten now, for political reasons.
These linguistic peculiarities explain a certain cultural difference between the eastern and western Serbs. One can therefore immediately recognize the region of origin of the interlocutor.
Finally, it should be noted that Serbs use the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets with the same ease.
This question also became a political issue in the 1990s, when there was sometimes a strong return to Cyrillic. Today, the media and the business community are using the Latin alphabet to a greater extent, as is society as a whole.
However, in order to preserve the uniqueness of the alphabet, its creators specified in the new Constitution that the Cyrillic alphabet was the only official one. Thus, the administration uses Cyrillic exclusively.
