Exophony on the example of the work of Ladislav Grosman

Abstract

Ladislav Grosman wrote his fiction in Czech, not in Slovak mother tongue. The study presents language particularities of Grosman´s fiction. I summarize the possible reasons for his exophonic writing in Czech. His fiction is the authentic example of Slovak-Czech bilingualism in literature, a specific example of exophony. The author´s Czech is unique in the phonological, lexical, morphological and syntactical impact of the maternal language – Slovak. Another particularity of the language is using Jewish expressions with the following sentence explanation, and retention of Zemplin dialect lexemes. These aspects represent the multicultural phenomenon of Grosman´s work. Multiculturality is evident within the thematization of immigration. Grosman focuses on the subjective feeling of newcomers to the State of Israel, the perception of the Yom Kippur conflict, the generation gap within the Jewish community, and differences between domestic and immigrant Jews. The study represents the first attempt to map the linguistical specifics of Grosman's language. It is also an important contribution to the issue of exophony in the Slovak literature context, which has not been studied systematically yet.

Keywords

• exophony
• productive bilingualism
• dialect
• jewish lexemes
• ladislav grosman