page_title: Greater Serbia
section_title: Vuk Karadžić's Pan-Serbism
hierarchical_section_title: Greater Serbia / History / Vuk Karadžić's Pan-Serbism
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of subdiarects of Shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian language 日本語: セルビア・クロアチア語のシュト方言の下位方言地図
context_page_description: The term Greater Serbia or Great Serbia describes the Serbian nationalist and irredentist ideology of the creation of a Serb state which would incorporate all regions of traditional significance to Serbs, a South Slavic ethnic group, including regions outside modern-day Serbia that are partly populated by Serbs. The initial movement's main ideology was to unite all Serbs into one state, claiming, depending on the version, different areas of many surrounding countries.
  The Greater Serbian ideology includes claims to various territories aside from modern-day Serbia, including the whole of the former Yugoslavia except Slovenia and part of Croatia. According to historian Jozo Tomasevich, in some historical forms, Greater Serbian aspirations also include parts of Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Its inspiration comes from one-time existence of the relatively large Serbian Empire that existed in 14th century Southeast Europe prior to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.
context_section_description: The most notable Serbian linguist of the 19th century, Vuk Karadžić, was a follower of the view that all south Slavs that speak the Shtokavian dialect (of Serbo-Croatian) were Serbs, speaking the Serbian language. As this definition implied that large areas of continental Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, including areas inhabited by Roman Catholics – Vuk Karadžić is considered by some to be the progenitor of the Greater Serbia program. More precisely, Karadžić was the shaper of modern secular Serbian national consciousness, with the goal of incorporating all indigenous Shtokavian speakers (Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim) into one, modern Serbian nation. German historian Michael Weithmann 
  considers that Karadžić expressed dangerous ideological and political idea in scientific shape ie that all southern Slavs are Serbs while Czech historian Jan Rychlik consider that Karadžić became a propagator of greater Serbian ideology and uttered a theory according to which are all Yugoslav people talking shtokavian dialect Serbs.
  There are at least 5 million people who speak the same language, but by religion they can be split into three groups ... Only the first 3 million call themselves Serbs, but the rest will not accept the name.
  — Vuk Karadžić, Srbi svi i svuda (Serbs All and Everywhere)
  This view is not shared by Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation) who sees him as a partisan of South Slav unity, albeit in a limited sense, in that his linguistic definition emphasized what united South Slavs rather than the religious differences that had earlier divided them. However, one might argue that such a definition is very partisan: Karadžić himself eloquently and explicitly professed that his aim was to unite all native Shtokavian speakers whom he identified as Serbs. Therefore, Vuk Karadžić's central linguistic-political aim was the growth of the realm of Serbdom according to his ethnic-linguistic ideas and not a unity of any sort between Serbs and the other nations.
caption: Shtokavian dialect, whose speakers Vuk considered Serbs in the 19th century.
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