‘Ajde’ and ‘Hajde’: Contexts of the Use of Balkanisms in Translations into South Slavic Languages

Abstract

The South Slavic languages belong to the wider Slavic language family and as far as we know, the similarities among them are very extensive. On the other hand, there are many differences between the South Slavic languages and other Slavic branches (the East and the West Slavic languages). To mention just one of them, it is the influence of the Turkish or Ottoman Turkish language. The influence of the Turkish language is very extensive among the South Slavic languages, but not so among the East and West Slavic languages. Nevertheless, the influence of the Turkish language is not consistent even among particular South Slavic languages. The purpose of this paper is to present the differences between the South Slavic languages which are based on the different usage of exclamations ‘ ajde ’ and ‘ hajde ’ among particular South Slavic languages, as from our experience this seems to be significant. The aim of this paper is to explore the contexts of these two exclamations in the three South Slavic languages, to compare the contexts, and to highlight the different usage of these two words not just among particular South Slavic languages, but also within individual language systems. We have found that the dictionaries of the researched languages do not contain the differences we found out by our comparison. For precise use of these words in identical contexts, we decided to use a comparative analysis of interlingual translations. We have chosen three translations of the children’s book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling, the Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian ones. We have compared the contexts in which these words occur, and we found fundamental differences, whose explanation we offer in this article.