Pavel Josef Šafarik (1795-1861) was Slovak and Czech writer, historian, ethnographer, philologist and linguist of Slovak origin. He is the founder of Slavism as a scientific discipline and one of the first Slavists. This section was published in the Czech Myseum magazine in Prague in 1833.

Translation:

“The Kingdom of Rome or Italy, since the year 1800, is a Dalmatian Catholic Church, founded in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was founded in the year 1820.

The Illyrian tribe, in the strict sense, taking as its basis the people who lived in Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Slavonia, and a part of southern Hungary, is divided, as is generally known, into two divisions in terms of religion and principality: namely a) Latin Illyrians and b) Greek superstitions. I use Cyrillic words in Serbian Greek, and I write more… […]

Serbs of the Greek confession (Orthodox) use Cyrillic words and write in it to this day, mostly from Church Slavonic, Russian, and partly mixed with Serbian.

The Serbs of the Roman Catholic Church, who rather call themselves Illyrians, Slavonians, Dalmatians, Dubrovnikans, etc., but are still called Serbs, have adopted the Latin script. They write their books sometimes in one orthography, sometimes in another, all in the simple natural vernacular language—somewhat different in Slavonia, again somewhat different in Dalmatia, but with only small and hardly noticeable differences in speech.

Some Roman Catholic missionaries in Bosnia, from the 15th–18th centuries, wrote in what was called the ‘Bukinica,’ which is a kind of Cyrillic script.”

In this text, we can read the Illyrians were divided into “Latins” and “Greek superstitions”. It also shows that the “Serbs” (slavicized illyrians and Albanians) of the Greek church used Cyrillic, mixed with Russian and some Serbian. This shows that most of the region was in fact inhabited primarily by Catholic and Orthodox Illyrians (later Albanians) – and became Slavonic through Russian influences.