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What is their origin? Some Albanian members here have said that the Mijaks of Macedonia are of Albanian origin. They claimed there used to be many Orthodox Albanians in Macedonia but they got assimilated into the ethnic Macedonian identity whereas Muslim Albanians retained their Albanian ethnic identity. Is there any truth to this? Other sources say that they have Aromanian origins.
This is what I get from their Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MijaksMijaks have been subject to ethnographic studies by Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbian scholars. According to the 2002 census, in the Municipality of Mavrovo and Rostuša there were 4,349 Macedonians (50.46%), 2,680 Turks (31,10%), 1,483 Albanians (17.21%), and smaller numbers of Bosniaks (0.36%), Roma (0.12%), Serbs (0.07%) and others (0.68%); In the Municipality of Debar there were a total of 19,542 inhabitants, of which 11,348 Albanians, 3,911 Macedonians, 2,684 Turks, 1,080 Roma, 22 Serbs, 3 Bosniaks, 2 Vlachs and 492 others.[26][verification needed]
• Macedonian historians[who?] are still uncertain as to whether the Mijaks were initially Aromanian speaking.[citation needed]
• Serbian authors as Jovan Cvijić classified Mijaks into South Slavs, precisely the 'western Macedonian variety' of the 'central type'. His conclusion about the ethnic origin of Mijaks was that nomadic Aromanians mixed with native Slavs and later with Serbs who moved from Ottoman Albania to avoid process of Albanisation and Islamisation.[27] In views of historical consciousness, he noted that the Mijaks had preserved traces of Serbian history (folklore, art, slava).[23] Milojko Veselinović (1850–1913) and Đoko Slijepčević (1907–1993) also noted their Serbian cultural traditions.[28]
• In their works from the beginning of the 20th century, Bulgarian ethnographers Vasil Kanchov and Dimitar Michev describe the local Mijak population as Bulgarian.[29][30] The researcher Georgi Traychev from Prilep also describes the Miyaks as part of the Bulgarian people, different from the other, neighboring ethnographic Bulgarian groups as the Barsjaks.[31]
The Mijak homeland is a region in western Macedonia called Mijachija and shares a border with Albania:
Does anyone have any theories on their origin?
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