Wilhelm Gause: Serbian rural population welcoming Emperor Franz Joseph’s ship on his Danube journey 1896, drawing, 1908

In the Habsburg Monarchy no distinction was made, as today, between the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians as southern Slav ethnic groups. Because of the great similarity of the languages, the speakers of this group of languages were known collectively as ‘Serbo-Croats’. For statistical purposes the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy inquired only about language but not about the national, cultural or confessional identity.