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Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks are Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia, a region in the west of the Balkan Peninsula. Bosnian Muslims are Slavs who were converted to Islam during the Ottoman period.
There are conflicting claims whether these Bosniaks were willingly or forcibly converted to Islam. However the strongest evidence shows that the Bosniaks, who as Bogomils were considered heretics by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, willingly embraced Islam.
They speak a variant of the common Serbo-Croatian language, written in the same form of the Latin alphabet which is also used in the Croat (or Western) variant of the Serbo-Croatian language. The main difference of the Bosnian language variant is that it contains many borrowings from Turkish - many of them being Arabic and Persian in origin - due to the Islamic faith of Bosniaks.
Bosnia forms now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a former Yugoslav Republic, having gained its independence in 1992 and suffered a long civil war (1992-1995).