Swój i obcy w litewskim językowym obrazie świata
“Familiar” and “foreign” in Lithuanian linguistic worldview

Summary/Abstract: The article compares the semantics of Lithuanian words savas ‘familiar, known’ and svetimas ‘foreign, alien’ with those concepts as they function in the consciousness of contemporary Lithuanian society. The author asks how the words’ semantics correlates with the changes of the concepts.Considerable emigration of Lithuanians to Western Europe and the United States, as well as opinion polls suggest that the people are dissatisfied with the situation in the country. In the media, Lithuania is evaluated more and more negatively, whereas other countries more and more positively. This is corroborated by the results of an experiment with the inhabitants and students in the city of Shyaulyay (Šiauliai) conducted by the author within the framework of Jerzy Bartmiński’s methodology. Of all the nationalities they evaluated Lithuanians as the lowest. In contrast, an analysis of dictionaries and corpora of Lithuanian reveals that savas is evaluated positively, while svetimas negatively. On this basis a conclusion is drawn that language lags behind changes in social awareness: the usage of the words savas and svetimas in contemporary Lithuanian reflects a traditional linguistic worldview despite changes in the concepts in people’s collective consciousness.

• Details
• Contents