NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE MIRROR OF LINGUISTIC STEREOTYPES

Abstract

The article analyzes the peculiarities in reflection of the same facts of reality in the consciousness of representatives of different nationalities, namely the specific features of the perception of such artifact as a car by the Russians and the Chinese. A special attention is paid to the problem of preservation of the linguistic identity of a people in the context of globalization, and in this connection the author considers some of the reasons for the increasing processes of linguistic unification at the present stage of development of the Russian language – Americanization of social consciousness, globalization, decrease in the level of the modern Russian culture etc. The problem of the national identity is analyzed through the prism of the linguistic realization of automobile preferences of the Russians and Chinese in texts of advertising slogans. The original author’s position is the conviction that the study of different worldviews of different peoples by identifying ethnic lingual stereotypes as the components of these views may contribute to the strengthening of positive trends in the military-political dynamics of the confrontation between the two poles of civilization – Western and Eastern. Conceptual statements are confirmed by a brief overview of the political and military situation in Russia. It is argued that the inclusion of cultural aspects in the methods of teaching foreigners the Russian language will facilitate the creative process on the way of overcoming the cold war between Russia and the West, including America. The analysis is based on discourse, semantic, and comparative methods with the involvement of the sociolinguistic experiment. The result proves the thesis that the humanities, including linguistics and cultural studies, are able, on a par with other sciences, to tackle the threats of the cold war, uniting different peoples on the basis of cultural and historical knowledge about each other.