Reflexions about the Metalinguistic Use of Turcisms in Contemporary Slovene

The aim of the paper is to point out the semantic aspects of some selected turcisms used in the linguistic system of contemporary Slovene. From a lessical corpus of loanwords of turkish origin, as classified in the two etymological dictionaries of the Slovene language (ESSJ, SES), the author has identified some items that have developed a semantic value, which is relevant also in an anthropological discourse about the perception of alterity. By observing the process of acquisition of the selected loanwords, we realize that they entered in the Slovene vocabulary relatively late and mostly through the Serbo-Croatian. Their semantic evolution towards a pejorative meaning, which can be shared, in fact, also by other Balkan languages as Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian, allows to outline a discussion on a metalinguistic level. The most significant case from the point of view of the diversity perception is the item čefur 'immigrant from the former Yugoslav republics', that have been in recent time morphologically tranformed in the Slovene linguistic space. This word carries the highest semantic strength by conveying the definition of the other, moreover it appears in literary works and other typologies of written language with relatively frequent occurrences, if compared with other items. The examination of this phenomenon from several perspectives will be first an attempt to analyse the question on a metalinguistic level and, at the same time, an exploration of the stereotyps which are conceived as definition of the other in Slovenia today. They essentially represent a result of the interaction with the Balkan linguistic and cultural world in the last century