Abstract
Language can be understood in many different ways - as a structured system with highly specific rules, a neutral tool of communication, a mirror of objective reality, or a distinctive cultural universe. Ethnolinguistics understands it in the latter sense: as an interpretative, evaluative, historically and culturally shaped model of the natural world, which we accept as children together with our mother tongue.
In this respect, meanings of words represent cultural artefacts of a particular kind, and by analysing them, we are able to study the symbolic systems of their respective cultures. In my paper, I will discuss Anna Wierzbicka's theory of the natural semantic metalanguage: a unique, non-ethnocentric, empirical methodology of ethnolinguistic research.
This conception, in our country still relatively unknown, presents a highly useful analytical tool whose potential goes far beyond the fields of linguistics and linguistic anthropology.