Immigrants in Slovenia and Their Language: Goran Voinovich's Novel “Southern Scum Go Home!”
A novel “Southern Scum Go Home!”(Ljubljana 2008) by G. Vojnović addresses the lives of the two generations of immigrants from the southern republics of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia; they received the pejorative designation “čefur” (scum) in the Slovenian language. The essay points out specific linguistic phenomena that emerge when several related cultures and languages come into contact. These phenomena include: marginal sociolect of the first generation of immigrants which is a form of interlanguage, and the excessive sociolect of the second bilingual generation, an example of the mixed language, as well as a significant factor in the devopment of the urban youth subculture of “čefurs.” We examine these phenomena and the inherent processes of lexical, morphological and syntactic hybridization of the Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian language codes. The immigrant border-zone world between the two different realms creates a complex and contradictory form of transcultural self-identification, language being one of the active tools.