Idioms as a reflection of French and English national character

Fedorova I., Butorina N.

The paper studies cultural and linguistic characteristics of idioms in French and English. Idioms, unlike vocabulary, is least subject to language change and retain their outdated and archaic forms and syntactic structures. This helps to accumulate information about the history, mentality and lifestyles of a particular people through the content of idioms, which are the basis of stereotypical ideas about peoples. The study is relevant due to the growing interest of today's linguists to the relationship between language and culture, language and people, as well as to ethnic and cultural identity of the idiomatic bulk of a language. The object of the study is the idioms in French and English. The subject of the research is their linguistic-cultural analysis. Idioms selected using the method of continuous sampling were subjected to comparative analysis, which allowed to identify common and specific character traits of the French and the British.

Keywords:idioms, national character, cultural linguistics of France and England, stereotypes