Discursive practices and metalinguistic comments in the speech of representatives of national minorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (The case of Slavic communities in the Republic of Srpska)

Abstract

The paper discusses the typology of metalinguistic comments in the speech of representatives of the Slavic minority communities residing in the Republic of Srpska (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Using a corpus of examples from the Ukrainian, Polish, Slovene and Czech languages gathered during fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2019, the authors show that the informants provide both contact elements and intralinguistic units with metalinguistic comments. Such comments reflect the complex ethnic and confessional composition of the area where the field research was conducted, providing information about the linguistic situation in the communities under scrutiny.

Keywords

• metalinguistic comments
• bilingualism
• bosnia and herzegovina
• language minorities
• slavic languages
• immigrant dialects
• ukrainian language
• slovene language
• polish language
• czech language
• serbian language
• field research
• code switching.