Prepoznavanje posuđenica u maternjem jeziku (sociolingvistički aspekt)
Recognition of Loanwords in the Mother Tongue (a Sociolinguistic Aspect)

Summary/Abstract: There is a significant number of loanwords in the Bosnian language and they are an indispensable part of the vocabulary. We are interested in loanwords from Romance languages. Furthermore, in the following text they are given appropriate individual names specifying the country of origin. The main corpus of researched loanwords is the dictionary of Bosnian language named Rječnik bosanskoga jezika. In order to collect information about speakers and their ability to recognize loanwords from languages they know and speak, I have conducted a sociolinguistic research. We have offered two questionnaires – for French and Italian speakers, while there was not sufficient data for Spanish and Portuguese to process. Moreover, the research was conducted from the perspective of sociolinguistics, a discipline that joins language and society. The essential features of this discipline help us to better perceive certain phenomena in language and the outcome of the questionnaire. We observed the influence of the society on language and reactions of the respondents, in this case the speakers. The final part of the questionnaire, more precisely, the results, will be presented in this paper. The paper also permeates the author’s expectations and compares the expected with the obtained. The research is based on the study of the behavior of individuals using a questionnaire as a scientific tool, the result of which will give the final judgment. Questionnaires find their theoretical basis in the subject of research which are loanwords in the language and these questionnaires are designed in a way to receive feedbacks from the respondents on the possibility of recognizing origin of a lexeme in their mother tongue that comes from the foreign language they speak. Additionally, the paper examines the influence of social context on the speaker, whether and to what extent the society around us can change our consciousness and whether it could directly affect language skills.

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