Ethnolinguistic Identity in the Discourse of the Crimean Region

This article is devoted to the study of regional discourse specifics in terms of reflecting the interaction between language and culture. It aims to study the regional identity of Crimean people, which, with all the ethnic diversity and cultural richness of the region, can be presented as a holistic, cohesive social unity. The purpose is, by using linguistics modeling, to construct and analyze the meaning of image-frames, sequence-frames, background-frames as stable cognitive structures and characterize language units of the associative fields “Language” and “Culture,” obtained as a result of a free associative experiment. The relevance of the study is determined not only by the need to broaden knowledge about people living on the Crimean Peninsula and identifying themselves as a linguocultural community but also to determine factors that influence the formation of regional discourse. The research material is represented by the data of the free associative experiment, correlated with the data obtained from lexicographic sources. The novelty of the research is the study vector, aimed at systematizing knowledge on the regional identity characteristic of a particular territory, namely, Crimea. The conducted analysis made it possible to characterize the linguistic and mental components that are significant for the region, which comprehensively and multifacetedly represent the identity of the Crimean population.