Oral Ballads-A Source of Valuable Stylistic Features

The present paper reveals and presents some linguistic and stylistic features in the oral poetry of Bosniaks, with a special focus on the sevdalinka. The analyses presented in this paper were inspired by the collection of sevdalinkas from the Anthology of Bosniak Oral Lyric Poetry. The analyses have been conducted on the phonological-phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and semantic level. The elicited stylomes have been classified according to a set of criteria and with the aim of elaborating their value and function in the sevdalinka. The main features of the sevdalinka are its folk elements – it is raised by people, and lives with them. Therefore, it is expected that the sevdalinka genuinely reflects the ambience of its people – not only spiritual, material, or social, but also the linguistic one. The language of the sevdalinka is a folk language, viz. the language of the period in which it was emerging. However, observed from a contemporary linguistic perspective, this language is an archaic expression embedding highly valuable stylistic features