The Place of Turkisms in Bulgarian Youth Slang

Abstract

Loanwords from Turkish can belong to different spheres of the Bulgarian lexicon: on the one hand, to the stylistic unmarked everyday vocabulary, often without a coexisting synonymous word of Bulgarian origin, and besides this we can find stylistic unmarked Turkish words in the Bulgarian literary language. On the other hand, several Turkish words belong to an archaic word stock, which is no longer in common use today, but in parts preserved in village dialects, at times known exclusively by elderly people. In contrast, several Turkish words are used by younger people, while bearing the Turkish origin of these words in mind, and used consciously with all their stylistic-semantic implications in the colloquial varieties of the urban centers, mainly for creating strongly expressive utterances. The liberalization of the language of the popular local newspapers led to the use of Turkish words in order to create lurid headlines.
In order to trace tendencies of recent stylistic and semantic developments of Turkish words in the present-day colloquial language, as well as their position in the diastratic system of Bulgarian, authentic material was analyzed having been collected in linguistic interviews (about the methodology, see p. 42). After shedding light on the process of becoming an obsolete lexeme, follows a presentation of word examples, including a short indication of the etymology, considerations about stylistics and frequency of use. Typical for non-standard lexemes in many colloquial varieties is the evolution from the primary semantic content of the etymon with a directly corresponding meaning of the respective loan – in this case, in a Bulgarian dialect – to a semantic development leading quite far from the primary semantic content (p. 44-53), full of expressivity and being able to create humoristic and surprising effects.