Lietuvos rusų ir rusakalbių sąvokos gimtoji kalba suvokimas
The concept of native language from the point of view of Russians of Lithuania and native speakers of Russian

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses definitions of the concept native language and different national concepts of the notion concerned with one’s mother tongue as well as its ambiguity arising in different research areas. The paper also includes some responses and reflections on a native language provided by Russian language speakers of Lithuania; the data has been extracted from the survey recently conducted in Lithuania. These reflections could be treated as naïve definitions of the above notion. Further in the paper, the key factors determining the respondents’ definitions of the native language are given. The spreading binary character of the categoryis also taken into consideration: more frequently, alongside one native language (of an early, pre-school period of life), there emerges another language (other than the one spoken at home, language of instruction), which is closely related to human cognition. The latter language becomes an individual’s second native language. The results of the survey have shown that the opposition between ‘own’ and ‘other’ language often characteristic of a homogenous monolingual society in the understanding of Russian speakers of Lithuania is replaced by two equally important ‘own’ halves.

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