Multiculturalism as a source of humor in terms of onomastics

The goal of the paper is to analyze the use of proper names in ethnic humour that illustrates language,cultural, and racial differences between one’s own ethnic group and foreign ones. Specifically, we workwith Slovak ethnic jokes in which proper names have various functions. Besides the dominant expressive function, they are used to indicate character’s ethnicity — for this purpose, mainly ethnonyms areused. Sometimes anthroponyms are used in this respect as well but since their identification function isweakened, they are usually accompanied by an ethnonym (or a toponym) which helps clarify the ethnicaspect. Alongside proper names, deethnonyms are used. Ethnic humour in general may be perceivedas an accompanying phenomenon of multiculturalism and globalization due to which various ethnicgroups are in mutual contact. Cultural encounter is often accompanied by creation of national and ethnicstereotypes which are reflected in a language of a particular ethnic group via phrasemes as well as jokes.Bearers of such stereotypes in jokes are groups of people — ethnic groups (represented by ethnonyms)and individuals — members of an ethnic group (represented by anthroponyms which refer to respectiveethnic groups). Ethnonyms and ethnicity-indicating anthroponyms, as formal bearers of ethnic andstereotypical information, refer to all members of the given ethnic group(s) and thus they serve as a parspro toto type of synecdoche.

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