Foreign lexis in Đorđe Balašević’s ballad “Boža Called the Jack”

The works of the Serbian poet and musician Dorde Balasevic (1953-2021) are widely known and appreciated throughout the former Yugoslavia. His creative output is deeply connected to Vojvodina, the region of his birth and lifelong residence. Balasevic's lyrics are distinguished by their precise linguistic characterization of personages, achieved through a predominant use of colloquial speech. This includes relevant lexical features such as colloquial vocabulary, jargon, dialectisms, and colloquialisms. A prominent feature of Balasevic's work is the abundance of loanwords, particularly Germanisms borrowed from Austrian German. This article analyzes the foreign lexicon in BaLasevic's ballad “Boza Called the Jack” - a narrative centered on characters from the gambling underworld. The study examines the origin, stylistic characteristics, and functional peculiarities of the foreign vocabulary in this work, with a specific focus on describing the stylistic potential of Germanisms as a means of artistic expression. The research methodology relied on multiple Serbian definition dictionaries, the linguistic websites “Jezikoslovac” and “Vukajlija” (a folk explanatory dictionary of slang), Wikipedia, and other online resources that provide insight into the native speakers' perspectives on particular lexical items and their usage in contemporary Serbian. The author concludes that Balasevic uses words of foreign origin, mostly known in the territory of the Serbian language, even if some of them are regionaLisms. Certain lexemes, having spread beyond Vojvodina, have acquired additional expressive, ironic, or otherwise reduced stylistic connotations, while others retain traces of their German etymology. Consequently, these linguistic units, while evoking the atmosphere of this formerly Austro-Hungarian region, do not hinder comprehension for other Serbian (or Serbo-Croatian) speakers across the former Yugoslavia. In the ballad “Boza Called the Jack,” the foreign vocabulary performs a distinct expressive and stylistic function: it reflects the speech of a specific social group and constructs the authentic atmosphere of the characters' world.

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