La lingua come ingegnere del carattere nazionale: studi di lingvokul’turologija

Abstract

Within post-Soviet Russian academy, the discourse on national character has gained a huge popularity thanks to a new scholarly field known as lingvokul’turologija (linguistic culturology). Moving from the assumption that language is “the engineer of human soul”, scholars propose to consider grammatical, lexical, and semantic structures of Russian language as clues which disclose traits of Russian national character. Whilst such discourse is inconsistent from the perspective of linguistic science, I suggest it is highly effective in that of the narrative identity it delivers; a narrative whose results go far beyond the boundaries of the academy.