Abstract
The Republic of Serbia, especially its northern region, Vojvodina Province, is profoundly diverse in ethnic composition. According to census results, more than 20 ethnic groups live in Vojvodina Province. Ethnic groups that have more legal representatives are guaranteed the right for their language to become one of the official languages. According to the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, the Serbian language was established as an official one with its Cyrillic script, but there is also official use of other languages and scripts: the Hungarian, Slovakian, Croatian, Romanian, and Ruthenian languages. Local government statutes have established languages and scripts that are in official use in certain municipalities, cities, or other inhabited places. During the previous century, changes in the ethnic structure of the population occurred, resulting in a change in the composition of the population toward the mother tongue. In the period after the foundation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, in 1918, when Serbia, together with Vojvodina Province, joined the new state, censuses were conducted every 10 years. In that period, the share of population with German mother tongue was significantly reduced, the share with Serbian mother tongue increased, and the shares with Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, and Ruthenian were maintained, and their languages were preserved in Vojvodina. For the purposes of this research, quantitative analysis and statistical methods were used to analyze the data, and cartography was used for illustrative presentation of the results.
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Funding was provided by the Provincial Secretariat for Higher Education and Scientific Research of the Vojvodina Province, Republic of Serbia – Project No. 142-451-2356/2018-01.
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Živković, M.B., Lukić, T., Stojisavljević, R. (2019). Changes in Population Composition and Mother Tongue in Serbia’s Vojvodina Province. In: Brunn, S., Kehrein, R. (eds) Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_154-1
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