The native and the foreign in the linguistic consciousness of the Siberians

Widespread opinions on ethnic, social, age, and gender groups or on separate representatives ofthese groups (stereotypes) attract attention of researchers of different branches of linguistics and alliedsciences. But the large list of psycholinguistic and cross-cultural studies lacks researches on subethnicstereotypes. Sub-ethnic stereotypes are common beliefs about certain communities that areintegral parts of some ethnos but have their cultural peculiarities and peculiarities in the perception ofthe world, as well as established opinions about somebody or something. Variations of sub-ethnicstereotypes comprise the images of the Siberians and the citizens of Moscow. The sub-ethnic stereotypesare mainly predicated on historical and geographical factors and relate to the notion of regionallinguistic consciousness. These issues are relatively unexplored in modern linguistics. However, theimportance of such researches is obvious, since they: 1) facilitate dealing with a fundamental problem"language - ethnos / sub-ethnos - culture"; 2) broaden our views on the mental space of the Russians;3) ease the understanding of the national and regional linguistic world-image phenomena.The goal of this research is to analyse sub-ethnic auto-stereotypes of the Siberians. Such associativefields as "the Siberians" and "the Muscovites" are first explored in comparison: linguistic unitsverbalizing axiological and cognitive components of the stereotypes are determined, their genderspecificvariations are considered.As a part of the research students of the following six Siberian institutions of higher educationwere surveyed: Siberian Federal University (the city of Krasnoyarsk), Krasnoyarsk State PedagogicalUniversity named after V.P. Astafiev, Siberian Institute of Business, Management and Psychology(the town of Krasnoyarsk), Tomsk State University, Tomsk State Pedagogical University, and TomskInstitute of Business. The methods widely applied in psycholinguistics, such as association experimentsand phrase completion, were used in the survey. The survey revealed that the emotional componentof the sub-ethnic stereotypes "the Siberians" and "the Muscovites" stands out in the first place,with positive features being attributed to "the native" and negative features attributed to the citizens ofthe Russian capital. The results of the association experiment show that the Siberians have their peculiaritiesin the perception of the world, which is reflected in the established collective beliefs about"the native" and the citizens of the Russian capital ("the foreign among the native"). The survey participantsin general have a negative attitude towards the citizens of the capital of the Russian Federation,which is accounted for a number of economic, political and socio-cultural reasons.

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