Abstract

By the beginning of the twenty-first century essentialism is giving way to the constructivist paradigm in the field of social sciences and humanities. However, linguistic essentialism survived all the shocks and received a classical form in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativism. The application of this hypothesis to the analysis of linguistic communities puts majority and minority languages in different positions: it makes strong languages even stronger, and simply kills small ones. The task of preserving minority languages in programs built using this methodology turns out to be impossible. In our humble opinion, two research paradigms are more adequate for the purpose. One of them is associated with the pragmatic turn in the analytical philosophy of language and represents a transition from the analysis of the structure of the language itself to the analysis of the conditions of communication, taking into account all the sociocultural components of this process. The second methodology is Erving Goff man’s concept of social face and performative behavior.