Lexical peculiarities of speech of the residents of Banja Luka and its representation in lexicography

The article is dedicated to the lexical peculiar features of the speech of residents of the capital of the Republika Srpska, the city of Banja Luka, who are native speakers of the Serbian literary language, compared with the speech of residents of central Serbia and Belgrade. The article analyzes the oral and written texts of the residents of Banja Luka, as well as questionnaires in which the respondents had to fill in the gaps in the sentences with semantically suitable words. The study showed that the regional ‘western’ vocabulary is not very frequent in the speech of the residents of Banja Luka; their speech is characterised by significant lexical variability manifested in the parallel use of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ vocabulary, both by the language collective as a whole and by individuum; neutralisation of regional differences in the media is also an important feature of the speech of Banja Luka. The regional specificity of the vocabulary of the inhabitants of Banja Luka is not reflected in the Serbian lexicography, in which the concept of regionalism requires clarification by the compilers.