The Core of the Language Consciousness of an Ethnic Group in Diachronic Aspect: Kazakh Associative Dictionaries

The article discusses the possibility of using the data of free associative experiments (SAE) and associative dictionaries, which can serve as a tool of ethno-psycholinguistic, cultural and sociopsychological research to identify the mental and ethno-cultural specificity of language consciousness and language pictures of the world of different ethnic groups, structuring the core of language consciousness (JAS), determining the basic values of society and, in the case of creating such dictionaries in different time periods, they are able to identify the transformation of the mental climate and value priorities of different generations of the same ethnic group. The content of the article is such intra-ethnic comparisons of associative behavior of the representations of the Kazakh ethnos of the modern and Soviet period in the hierarchy of value priorities, their stability and transformation, reflected in the nuclear zones of the language consciousness of young people of two generations with a forty-year interval. On the basis of the coincidence of the basic values in the conceptual center of the core of language consciousness, the article concludes about a certain stability and immutability of cultural, mental and behavioral traditions of the Kazakh ethnic group.