Basic concepts of the linguoethnological approach to personal identification

The article describes the primordial linguoethnological approach to the basic notion of ethnicity and compares linguoethnic identification with a person’s ethnic self-identification. The definition of the basic concepts of linguoethnology is given: «linguoethnos», «native language» and «nation-al language». The linguoethnos is interpreted as an association of people who have an identical native language. In native languages, the primordial definition is used as a functionally first lan-guage. The boundaries of the national language are determined based on four characteristics: lin-guonim certainty, ethnic attachment, the presence of a literary language, and the presence of an official status. A typology of linguoethnoses is given, represented by a superlinguoethnos, a basic linguoethnos and a sublinguoethnos. For the basic linguoethnos as the basis of linguoethnic divi-sion, isomorphic (basic, transformed and selective) and non-isomorphic (genetic and conjunctur-al) models of the correlation of linguoethnic identity and ethnic self-identification are distin-guished.