Category: Yugosphere

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Four people sitting in a row behind four laptops, each wearing a microphone headset

Working in IT? What do you call yourself? An IT-ian, a Hitechist…?

Working in IT? 👩🏻‍💻 Would you call yourself an IT-ian, Hitechist or Startupist? These are literal translations of actual terms used to describe people working in IT. In Bosnian 🇧🇦, Croatian 🇭🇷, Montenegrin 🇲🇪 and Serbian 🇷🇸, people working in IT are known as “IT-jevac” (m), “IT-jevka” (f) and “IT-jevci” (p). Of course “IT” is […]

Back from my research road trip of Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia

Back from a week researching around Montenegro 🇲🇪, Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦 and Croatia 🇭🇷 with a writer friend of mine. An amazing time! 🚗 ✈️ For anyone working with languages, trips to “territory” (where those languages are spoken) are valuable for language maintenance and seeing and hearing what’s on trend linguistically, particularly slang. There’s […]

You do Montenegrin and Bosnian, right?

Two more language directions have been added to my Institute of Translation and Interpreting profile (check it out here https://www.iti.org.uk/directory/member/mr-nick-nasev.html):⭐ Bosnian to English⭐ Montenegrin to English That brings my total to six 𓃎. Some background… The breakup of Yugoslavia over 30 years ago transformed what was once one language, Serbo-Croatian, into four: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin […]

Man wearing a white top and a woman in a red, blue, and orange sun dress standing to the right of a 1950s grey Mercedes sports car in the driveway in front of a white house covered by greenery

Oldtajmer, evergrin, rekorder, golman… the world of Balkan pseudo-anglicisms

Did you hear about the man who collects “old-timers”? 👴🏽Or that Frank Sinatra has many “evergreens”? 🌲Or the woman who was a rowing “recorder”? ▶Or how the best player on the field was the “goal man”? 🎯And how one unfortunate person was a victim of “mobbing” in the workplace? 👥 These are all actual examples […]

Cartoon character featuring redhead woman from the Redhead matches, smoking a cigarette and crying

Smoker’s remorse… or how false friends can be deeply expressive

🟰 Words that look the same or similar in two languages but have two, at times radically, different meanings are called “false friends”. There are plenty of them in most languages, and particularly between Slovenian and the other Southern Slavic languages, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian. 💁🏻 A particular false friend I love […]

Naš jezik at Munich Airport

I’m about to fly off to Australia transiting through Munich Airport 🇩🇪 … so I’m preparing myself to be ready to speak in “naš jezik” (“our language”). 👉 So what is this “naš jezik” (“our language”)?👉 And why is it spoken at Munich Airport? “Naš jezik” is the euphemism used by people from ex-Yugoslavia in […]