Slovak Folk Culture and Communicative Competence

[Emma Hoholik]

During my trip to Bratislava, I remember turning on the television in my Airbnb and flipping through the channels. A program with a lush, mountainous background and dancing people in embroidered dress truly stuck out to me; it was a group of folk performers dancing and singing in the High Tatras. Throughout my short stay in Bratislava, folk culture was continually emphasized with gift shops boasting traditional folk wear and advertisements for different folk performances. Though folk culture is a defining part of Slovak identity and life, this part of Slovak culture was lost over the years of Communist rule. Dance houses (tanečny dom) represent one of the important establishments in the reclamation of Slovak folk culture. Scholar Joseph Feinberg explains that dance houses invite anyone and everyone to learn folk dance with no regard to skill level or ability: “there are only participants and instructors, the latter half whom are there to guide the participants, enabling them to learn the principles of traditional folk dance and to enjoy themselves just as the inhabitants of every Slovak village once did: dancing “for the pleasure of it” (pre vlastné potešenie, to use a phrase common in Slovak folkoloristics)”. Folk culture translates to language through its emphasis on informality and the avoidance of formal institutional structures. The desire to make folk culture available to all and avoid formal institutions indicates a potential for more casual style conversation. Focusing on folk culture calls for the ability to produce imaginative, interactional, and personal functions of language. As folk culture also focuses on personal pleasure and feeling, a person’s ability to command attention and autonomy becomes vital in order to experience folk culture on an individual level. If I want to learn more about Slovak folk culture, I will have to watch videos of performances, read the lyrics of folk songs (in English and in Slovak), read common folktales (also in English and in Slovak), further research the history of folk culture, and acquire vocabulary needed to engage in this type of culture. This type of vocabulary includes names for traditional folk wear, common phrases derived from folk stories, and different terms for learning dance and song.