Balkan-Chinese rock, with a Turkish twist

From Charles Belov:

This song turned up on my Apple Music new music playlist. Imagine my surprise when, in the middle of this Balkan-language (Croatian, I think, the page mentions "hrvatsko") pop/rock song, Mandarin hip-hop turned up.

"Mladen Burnać (feat. Rock) – Džaba Džaba"

Here's the original video in Croatian:

An earlier song is called just "Džaba":

Google Translate defines "Džaba" as "for free", and offers the following Croatian translations of "free":  besplatno, slobodno, zabadava, franko, badava, džaba.

In Serbian "Džaba" would be "Џаба" (see here for the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet).

Google Translate renders "free" into Serbian as "бесплатно, слободно, забадава, бадава".

As I was about to wrap up this post, I decided to take a deeper look at this intriguing Serbo-Croatian word "Džaba / Џаба", and it turns out to be of Ottoman Turkish derivation:  جبا‎ (caba).  The pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian џа̏ба / džȁba is /dʒâba/.  It is an adverb and has the regional meanings "for free", "very cheap", and "futile".  (Wiktionary)

There are hundreds of words in Serbo-Croatian that derive from Ottoman Turkish, my favorites being baklava (yum in all languages), efendija (cf. Āfántí 阿凡提, Effendi, Nasreddin), and karagöz ("shadow play"; see here and here):

“Black-eye” Karagöz is well known in nearly all Balkan languages as a comic figure, and karagözlük as foolish behaviour.

(Source, p. 167)

From Serbo-Croatian rock to the shadow play, one cannot overlook the impact of the Ottomans, and I'm not talking about an item of furniture.