Ethnolinguistics in the Year 2016

Abstract

This article is the voice of “Etnolingwistyka’s” editor-in-chief on the current tasks of ethnolinguistics as a scholarly subdiscipline, as well as of the journal. According to the author, of the two foundations of Slavic ethnolinguistics mentioned by Nikita Tolstoy (i.e., its pan-Slavic character and the unity of language and culture) it is mainly the latter that has preserved its topicality: language is the source of knowledge about people and human communities, as well as the basis for building one’s identity (individual, national, regional, professional). The agenda of cultural linguistics has been followed by the contributors to the present journal and its editorial team with a focus on various genres of folkore, the problems of the linguistic worldview, and in recent issues with studies on the semantics of selected cultural concepts (family, democracy, equality, otvetstvennost’, etc.). Ethnolinguistic research of this sort, seeking “culture in language” (i.e. in the semantic layer of linguistic forms), render ethnolinguistics (especially in its cognitive variant) close to Western cultural or anthropological linguistics. When Slavic ethnolinguistics, being treated as a cultural linguistics, focuses on the semantics of value terms, it stands a good chance of engaging in a dialogue with Western anthropological linguistics and contributing original insights to the common body of research on values. A specific proposal in this direction is the international project EUROJOS.