TABOOS AND STIGMATIZATION AND THEIR MANIFESTATIONS IN LANGUAGE AND SLANG

TABOOS AND STIGMATIZATION AND THEIR MANIFESTATIONS IN LANGUAGE AND SLANG

Sokolija, Alma

This paper deals with two separate but related subjects: linguistic taboos and linguistic stigmatization illustrated through French and Bosnian languages and slangs (Paris versus Sarajevo). Through these two universal categories, we will try to illustrate their linguistic issues in substandard language where they are well visible. Since the slang is a linguistic form which deals with social taboos and stigmatized categories of people, these topics are present and explicit in its forms while they are normally hidden in standard language forms. The theoretical frame for our stigmatization analysis is especially Erving Goffman’s book Stigma, while our taboo analysis comes out partially from our PhD thesis work on the comparison of French and Bosnian slangs, published in France. Since Bosnia and Herzegovina is a multicultural country, taboo and stigmatization sometimes appear in the very complex patterns but these categories are nevertheless present even in French language and society in the very similar way. The subject itself deals also with cultural identity. The sacred and neuralgic topics are very similar in these societies which are visible by used linguistic stereotypes in many expressions. Nevertheless, while in French the religious taboo is a little bit more visible, religious taboos but also the taboo of family relationships are more present in Bosnian culture, where the place of mother as a central figure of the family stays as the sacred one. We will try to prove these claims by examples from substandard language where especially vulgarisms show this aspect of universal linguistic expressions. In this paper we shall try to prove in which way our language reflects our unconscious part and in which way it reflects and betrays our most hidden impulses. We shell also try to enrich the paper with some examples/equivalents from the English slang and this might be interesting from the perspective of the contrastive analysis approach.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3357