Tolerance and Intolerance in the Language Consciousness of Modern Students

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of tolerance and intolerance in the linguistic consciousness of modern student youth. The relevance of the problem is due to the increased attention to such a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional area as the North Caucasus region. The purpose of the study is to identify the degree of formation of tolerant consciousness of students born and raised in the post-Soviet period in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, in one of the polylingual subjects of the Russian Federation. In the article, tolerance is considered as a value significant in the life of society and ensuring positive interaction. Its semantic core in the linguistic consciousness of students, according to the quantitative and qualitative characteristics obtained, is made up of such associations as respect, tolerance, as well as the sets of unwritten moral and ethical standards of behavior such as namys, habze, adet, which integrate the complex of important, value-oriented components of universal human and national traditions. The work has been carried out on the basis of the receptive and free associative experiments data, which, on the one hand, verify the maintenance of dictionary definitions, and on the other – show verbal associative reactions representing rather deep understanding of the essence of the concepts ‘tolerance’ and ‘intolerance’ by the respondents. The latter demonstrates the fixedness in the above-mentioned concepts in the conceptual system of the student’s youth.