Abstrakt
The paper "Born in Bosnia to Ethnically Czech Families: Identity, Language, Traditions" examines what remains of Czech identity in Czech families who have not seen the land of their ancestors for almost one and a half centuries and who were widely forgotten by their homeland. Numbers of the Czech population in Northern Republika Srpska (Bosnia and Herzegovina), already a minority, are declining: assimilation is stronger and stronger.
Nevertheless, some ethnic Czechs born in local communities, in villages in rural areas near the Sava River with a formerly ethnic Czech majority, still preserve the language, religions, traditions, culture and identity of their ancestors from Bohemia and Moravia, who came to the area at the beginning of the 1890s after living two decades in Volhynia in Imperial Russia (current Ukraine). The paper summarizes briefly the factors influencing preservation of rests of heritage language and identity, and presents specific traditions during the year, reflected in dozens of hours of recordings with Czechs from Bosnian villages.