National-cultural code and the linguistic construction of social identity in Jura Fozil’s “The garden”: A Linguopragmatic study

Abstract

This study investigates the linguistic construction of national-cultural meaning and social identity in Jura Fozil’s short story The Garden (Bog‘) through a linguopragmatic and sociopragmatic framework. The analysis focuses on culturally marked vocabulary, forms of address, phraseological units, conversational speech, Uzbek–Russian language contact, and the pragmatic organization of character interaction. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between institutional status and communicative power. The speech of the collective farm chairman demonstrates that administrative authority does not necessarily ensure interactional dominance: when communication shifts to Russian, his fragmented hybrid speech reveals linguistic insecurity and alters the distribution of communicative power. In contrast, phonologically adapted Russian-derived elements occurring in children’s speech function as relatively integrated components of everyday interaction. The study further argues that the image of the garden develops from a physical space of childhood and communal life into a linguocultural symbol of memory and loss. The findings demonstrate that Fozil’s multilingual and culturally marked discourse does not merely reproduce the linguistic environment of a historical period; it serves as a literary mechanism for constructing social identity, interpersonal distance, value systems, and implicit authorial evaluation. The study contributes to the linguopragmatic interpretation of multilingual literary discourse by demonstrating how linguistic choice mediates the relationship between social status, communicative competence, and cultural memory.