This article is about the Bosnian animated series Bruca Braca Bruda Brada which deals with contemporary social issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on Švrakino selo, a predominantly working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Sarajevo. The series’ creators are Helem Nejse, a Sarajevo-based hip-hop band. The humour stands out because of the linguistic subtlety through which contemporary society is portrayed, focusing especially on the Sarajevo area. Stylistically, the slang, the wordplay, the counter-images of real-life politicians, criminals and events are all part of a layered storyline, painting an image of a society trapped for over three decades in the limbo of expectations of a better life. The analytical framework consists of the following units, superficially functioning as general knowledge scripts: names, nationalism, (local) patriotism, know-it-all and corruption. However, these scripts, in the context of the analysed material, become restricted, making the humorous interpretation challenging not only to an international audience, but also to native speakers in some instances. Stylistic traits of the selected material are observed, together with additional linguistic devices that enhance humour. Culture-specific expressions and other important contextual segments are also explained where necessary.

The aim of this paper is to conduct a semantic analysis of humour in the anecdotes about Nasreddin Hodja collected and edited by Alija Isaković in 1984. Humour research in linguistics is becoming increasingly popular in BiH, but is naturally focused mainly on contemporary humour, wheth er this be jokes, political discourse or some other contemporary corpus. Through Victor Raskin’s semantic script theory of humour (SSTH), the paper examines whether the three basic categories of analysis are present in the selected examples from the corpus: 1) to which of the three basic classes do scripts in binary opposition belong; 2) which subcategory do they belong to; 3) whether they are part of common, restricted or individu al scripts. The examples are analysed within the classification of anecdotes offered by Isaković. Special attention is given in the analysis to each of the categories in an effort to recognise the reasons for such a grouping of humorous text. The examples under consideration have a structure that bears more resemblance to short jokes than to longer anecdotes. This is because in ideal circumstances, not always, Raskin’s semantic theory applies to the verbal humour of jokes, but also because of the limitations placed on the length of this text. This is why this text should be seen as merely a hint of the layers of humour in anecdotes that are a part of our cultural heritage, although they are directed at a character who reached our region through another culture.

Derviš Sušić is undoubtedly one of the most versatile writers of the 20th century Bosnia and Herzegovina. His opus, characterised by a peculiar stylistic expression contains metaphors that make the storyline, otherwise set in a certain historical period, timeless, i.e., ever-current and again-enlightening. This paper aims at analysing metaphors in the translation of Sušić’s novel Uhode, published in English in 2017 by the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Spies. The methodological framework applied is Lakoff and Johnson’s linguistic approach, whereby the source text and the translation are compared within their source and target domains. In that sense, translatability, i.e. the possibility of achieving the identical content of the source and target domains in the translation is observed within Newmark’s model of translation strategies.

Semiotics describes how advertising messages manipulate the connection between ‘meaning’ and ‘reality’ by investigating how already determined meanings are attributed to given products, thus establishing methods of decoding their true meaning. Therefore, the central theme of the semiotic approach to advertising is establishing a connection between meaning and reality. To that extent, semiotics as the science of signs is not an abstract study but rather reflects the essence of social life emphasizing the multi-layered and dynamic character of meaning creation. Advertising messages, therefore, have as much meaning as they have ‘readers’. This research aimed to establish a connection between gender stereotypes and advertising messages, i.e. to point out the main gender stereotypes shown in advertising messages, and to determine whether, in the new century, there have been changes in the way and contexts of the portrayal of women and men in advertisements compared to of the same in the past. A total of 31 advertising messages displayed in a women’s magazine were examined. A detailed analysis of the visual representation of female and male bodies, symbols, body positioning, and products was conducted. Messages are direct and open. Human bodies are glorified by emphasizing a healthy, well-shaped, well-groomed female and male body as a symbol of the extension of the species. It has also been noted that advertising messages reflect changes in society and social expectations among members of both sexes.

This paper contains an analysis of the selected scenes from the play Krokodil Lacoste / Silvertown by Zlatko Topčić. The play won the “Alija Isaković” award in 2010, while the Cultural Association of Bosniaks Preporod published its dual Bosnian and English edition in 2016. The segments are analyzed parallelly in Bosnian and English for the purpose of observing the level of functional equivalence in the target text. The analysis entails extralinguistic and linguistic categories in accordance with the model developed by Hatim and Mason (1990) and later expanded by Zhang et al. (2015). The extralinguistic category includes, among others, the culture-translation relationship, and the linguistic category entails three dimensions: communicative, pragmatic, and semiotic. The analysis in this case includes the communicative and semiotic components.

Humour has been an inexhaustible subject of many a linguistic research effort, starting from sociolinguistics, through discourse analysis, to pragmatics. Incongruity is at the very core of all linguistic research of humour, and it entails an opposition of semantic notions, causing an imbalance between the punchline and the expectations of the cognitive agents. That is how humour is generated. The aim of this paper is to observe the way in which conceptual metaphor contributes the rise of humour in Alan Ford, a comic widely popular even today in the former Yugoslav area. The comic’s popularity has been huge to the extent that many expressions and quotes have become part of everyday speech of many people.