Језички идентитет појединца у пограничју
Linguistic Identity Of Individuals In Border Areas

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the questions of identity and analyzes the discourse of the actor-narrator in the book “Three Names for One Growing-up: Pavle, Pal, Paul”. The aim of the paper is to discover the mutual causality of the actor’s own identity and to define the status of all languages he used in everyday communication, his speech features, and his narrative strategies. The key component of the research is his multi-layered identity, which is revealed on several levels - as the identity of the text, as a national, confessional, and cultural identity of a person, as the identity of proper names as a kind of a “label”, and as linguistic identity. The identity of the text itself can be defined as a combined one, being composed of three discursive parts: the text of the author (researcher in Psychology), the text (answers) of the narrator, and the accompanying text, which provides additional information about the historical, geographical, and political background. Attitudes and opinions of the interviewee on national and confessional identity are free of any prejudices towards other groups, which is uncommon for studies of this type. The same can be concluded about the language situation: despite the fact that Serbian and Hungarian have been switching their status of the official language (and the language of education) and that this could have been one of the complications for him and his family, the narrator does not show any sign of indignation.

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