Natural landscape specificity as reflection of national linguistic world image in the context of Irish folk fairy tales

This work presents a study into the problem of the national world image and deals with such concepts as linguistic and national world image. People’s ideas of the world around find their application in language expressions, particularly on the lexical level. This research studies lexical units describing the natural landscape in the context of their representation in Irish folk fairy tales. The work thus aims at studying the lexical aspect of Irish English as well as the peculiarities of its reflection in Irish folk fairy tales. The research results show that the vocabulary of the natural landscape in Irish English differs from the British norm mainly by the national-language features of geographical object representation, which is necessary to preserve the Irish national identity. It should be noted that the texts of some fairy tales feature culture-specific lexical units describing the natural landscape. Some of the lexical units are borrowings from the Irish Gaeilge. They have not assimilated into Irish English and are most often used as part of historically formed place names. Others have been completely assimilated into Irish English in the form of lexical or phonetic calques. Both the assimilated and non-assimilated lexical units reflect the Irish national and linguistic identity.