A warum You nicht ballare?! Makaronizam, jezični mimetizam i ludizam u hrvatskoj popularnoj glazbi
A warum you nicht ballare? Macaronics, Linguistic Mimetics and Witticism in Popular Music in Croatia

Summary/Abstract: Lyrics in popular music are an important site of language contacts, of hybridization and of symbolic and ludic use of linguistic material. They are a source and a vehicle of linguistic innovations. However, the study of lyrics mostly focuses on their relation with the global expansion of English, although various historically existing language practices in the receiving societies can shed additional light to the topic: in the case of Croatia, this would concern the contact points with Italian and German. The paper analyses examples from various music genres, and shows analogies with early modern and post-modern macaronic poetry and the linguistic witticism of popular and élite cultures, including the use of phonetic analogies and other selected features to create linguistic metonymy. On that basis, the paper argues that popular music should be both synchronically and diachronically integrated into culture, and proposes a typology of linguistic interpolations and interferences.

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