“War and peace of languages and cultures” through the eyes of foreign and Russian students

The correlation between language, mindset and culture has been a relevant linguistic subject for many years. The research focuses on comparing one of the speech etiquette elements of the Russian and English languages that reflects different ethnic, cultural and language assumptions. The author looks into the correlation between such concepts as speech etiquette and politeness in the context of their ethnic specificity and involvement in the language picture of the world. The peace of languages is understood as an association of people for friendship and cooperation, the war of languages - as a set of language and cultural barriers, which are put up by language and culture. In this regard the article investigates the features of communicative behavior of foreign (English) students who annually come to Petrozavodsk State University under the Russian Language Undergraduate Studies (RLUS) language training program, in comparison to the communicative behavior of Russian students in one standard situation of daily communication. The research uses data received by interviewing respondents during the period from 2011 to 2017 and makes conclusions about ethnic and cultural differences in the perception of an identical communicative situation by English and Russian students. Methods of semantic, pragmatic and lexicographic analysis are used. The relevance of a research is based on the need for studying the national style of communication - a concept recently introduced to the linguistic circles.