Ethnic groups in Yugoslavia

Based on language, the "Yugoslavs" (collectively Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Slavic Muslims) constituted 82.87 percent of the country's population.

[1] Communist Yugoslav terminology used the word "nation" (nacija, narod) for the country's constitutive peoples (konstitutivne nacije), that is, for the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Muslims, Macedonians, and Montenegrins.

[2] Following the Liberation of Yugoslavia, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia reorganized the country into federal republics (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro), five of them being eponymous states of each constitutive nation, i.e. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins, and unique multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This minority criterion (a combination of historical and ethnic criteria) was only applied to Serbia (and not Italian-inhabited Istria, or Serb-inhabited parts of Croatia, for example).

The presence of constitutive peoples in territories other than their "nation state" (i.e. Serbs in Croatia) was rejected as a basis for potential autonomous provinces, as Communist rhetoric maintained that each constituent people had a home republic, and was therefore unable to obtain autonomy status in another republic despite significant presence.